Pre-amble:

I’ve taken a travel year with my family, heading more or less East until we find ourselves back in Quebec (or prove the Flat-Earthers correct!) I’ve always liked to read something from the places I travel to, and I thought it would make a fun quest to explore the world simultaneously through the books of each country we visit. Like a literary Anthony Bourdain.

Of course, we can’t pretend to understand a culture from a few books; we aren’t going to catalyze a series of epiphanies and insights here… …no, OK, we can pretend. And pretending is fun. And cultures are different. Arts are different. Sensibilities and worldview differ. What a boring world it would be otherwise!

And if this project doesn’t turn up any cultural insights — which I’ll be honest, insights are pretty far between for me — it will still be fun. So let’s go.

Amble:

Argentina and her literary champion were revelatory. When we started the trip, we had a general idea of what we would be doing in Colombia and Peru, but Argentina was a black box. We had chosen it to make our son feel part of the planning process: he’s a Messi fan.

And what the heck, why not? It turned out Argentina had an immense treasury to offer. Including, especially, Jorge Luis Borges: a writer whose stories one could imagine physically rivalling Argentina’s stupendous natural sights.

I can’t say Borges is my favourite writer of the trip, or even my favourite of South America (#TeamVargasLlosa) but he may be the most interesting, original, intelligent and powerful storyteller I’ve ever encountered. Borges. Wow. You have to respect an imagination and audacity like that. That’s magical realism!

He opened my eyes to what fiction, particularly short fiction, could be. His stories are often not stories at all, they are just concepts, imaginary worlds: imagine if….

Now, I look back on so many of the authors I’ve consumed over the years and realize they are all Borges children — from Herman Hesse to Kurt Vonnegut to David Foster Wallace. Writers who influenced me were influenced by Borges. More: Umberto Ecco, Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins, Neil Gaiman. Some have acknowledged Borges’ influence, while others seem, in retrospect, impossible without him. I had always heard of Barth, but never felt enough momentum to read him until I began exploring more on Borge’s influence. Barth is most definitely a child of Borges, one who also admits how Borges expanded for him the realm of what is possible in storytelling (try the Night-Sea Journey for a great example).

“Reading the work of Jorge Luis Borges for the first time is like discovering a new letter in the alphabet, or a new note in the musical scale.”- from a BBC.COM article

Borges is often called the godfather of Latin American Boom: First Borges, then the Boom. So, he is godfather of the two authors I’ve previously read on this trip, Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa.

In Buenos Aires, the start of our Argentinian and my Borgean experience, we stayed in a small flat in a run-down area at the edge of Palermo. Buenos Aires is a sprawling megalopolis, but our neighbourhood and time here was peaceful; the tempo of Palermo itself seemed slow and of a different era. We spent our time homeschooling and exploring the neighbourhood. Buying cheap, great red wine at the corner store. I found an old boys rugby team to practice with. We saw a wonderful tango show*. The kids ran their first 1k race. I got my first ink. I tell you, Borges left a more permanent mark on me!

I read The Aleph. The Aleph is one of Borges major short stories, the title story for his second collection (published 1949), and a many-layered tale of love, loss, art, and a spot on a basement staircase from which the entire universe can be seen.

Hooked after The Aleph, I went back to his first short story collection, Ficciones, published and expanded between 1941 and 1956. One of his first stories stands as a flagpost on the fantastical territory he was staking out: in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

The story’s narrator is one of the first to stumble upon the hidden references to Uqbar, a land supposedly adjoining Iraq, in obscure encyclopaedia and atlases. Failing to find corroborating sources for this unknown realm, he and a few friends follows the mystery for years before a major new reference source on Uqbar appears.

Ashe left it in the bar where, months later, I found it. I began to leaf through it and felt a sudden curious lightheadedness, which I will not go into, since this is the story, not of my particular emotions, but of Uqbar and Tlön and Orbis Tertius. In the Islamic world, there is one night, called the Night of Nights, on which the secret gates of the sky open wide and the water in the water jugs tastes sweeter; if those gates were to open, I would not feel what I felt that afternoon. The book was written in English, and had 1001 pages. On the yellow leather spine, and again on the title page, I read these words: A First Encyclopaedia of Tlön. Volume XI. Hlaer to Jangr. There was nothing to indicate either date or place of origin. On the first page and on a sheet of silk paper covering one of the colored engravings there was a blue oval stamp with the inscription: ORBIS TERTIUS. It was two years since I had discovered, in a volume of a pirated encyclopedia, a brief description of a false country; now, chance was showing me something much more valuable, something to be reckoned with. Now, I had in my hands a substantial fragment of the complete history of an unknown planet, with its architecture and its playing cards, its mythological terrors and the sound of its dialects, its emperors and its oceans, its minerals, its birds, and its fishes, its algebra and its fire, its theological and metaphysical arguments, all clearly stated, coherent, without any apparent dogmatic intention or parodic undertone. 

As more and more references to Uqbar and the double-imaginary Tlön are discovered by others than the narrator, they impregnate themselves fully into the popular consciousness. Now just, read this. THIS is Borges:

The popular magazines have publicized, with pardonable zeal, the zoology and topography of Tlön. I think, however, that its transparent tigers and its towers of blood scarcely deserve the unwavering attention of all men. I should like to take some little time to deal with its conception of the universe. Hume remarked once and for all that the arguments of Berkeley were not only thoroughly unanswerable but thoroughly unconvincing. This dictum is emphatically true as it applies to our world; but it falls down completely in Tlön. The nations of that planet are congenitally idealist. Their language, with its derivatives—religion, literature, and metaphysics—presupposes idealism. For them, the world is not a concurrence of objects in space, but a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is serial and temporal, but not spatial. There are no nouns in the hypothetical Ursprache of Tlön, which is the source of the living language and the dialects; there are impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic suffixes or prefixes which have the force of adverbs. For example, there is no word corresponding to the noun moon, but there is a verb to moon or to moondle. The moon rose over the sea would be written hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, or, to put it in order: upward beyond the constant flow there was moondling. (Xul Solar translates it succinctly: upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned.) The previous passage refers to the languages of the southern hemisphere. In those of the northern hemisphere (the eleventh volume has little information on its Ursprache), the basic unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. Nouns are formed by an accumulation of adjectives. One does not say moon; one says airy-clear over dark-round or orange-faint-of-sky or some other accumulation.

This is like reading a genius’ mushroom trip.

One of the schools in Tlön has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, that the past is no more than present memory. Another school declares that the whole of time has already happened and that our life is a vague memory or dim reflection, doubtless false and fragmented, of an irrevocable process. Another school has it that the history of the universe, which contains the history of our lives and the most tenuous details of them, is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a demon. Another maintains that the universe is comparable to those code systems in which not all the symbols have meaning, and in which only that which happens every three hundredth night is true. Another believes that, while we are asleep here, we are awake somewhere else, and that thus every man is two men.

Borges invents for Tlön a fanciful, but somehow complete, mathematics. I remember in Calvin & Hobbes, the father messing with Calvin re black and white pictures.

More on Tlon:

The books themselves are also odd. Works of fiction are based on a single plot, which runs through every imaginable permutation. Works of natural philosophy invariably include thesis and antithesis, the strict pro and con of a theory. A book which does not include its opposite, or “counter-book,” is considered incomplete. Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality. In the very oldest regions of Tlön, it is not an uncommon occurrence for lost objects to be duplicated. Two people are looking for a pencil; the first one finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real,  but more in keeping with his expectation. These secondary objects are called hrönir and, even though awkward in form, are a little larger than the originals. Until recently, the hrönir were the accidental children of absent-mindedness and forgetfulness… …One curious fact: the hrönir of the second and third degree—that is,  the hrönir derived from another hrön, and the hrönir derived from the hrön of a hrön—exaggerate the flaws of the original; those of the fifth degree are almost uniform; those of the ninth can be confused with those of the second; and those of the eleventh degree have a purity of form which the originals do not possess.

So much of Borges feels like this. As he progressed he learned to better interweave more satisfying narrative with his imaginary rocket rides.

Borges fictional form was the short story. An art form he vastly enlarged. His stories are often told third hand, the supposedly central narrative seeming almost as an excuse to give grounding to the more and more baroque framing stories, which finally appear like a librarian’s bibliographical notes on the inner framing story. (E.g. Story-proper, told in summary or just partially, as part of a fictitious literary critique of that story, which literary critique is then described in bibliographic detail by an unnamed narrator, who is telling us the circumstances under which he discovered this critique and what he thinks of it.) Borges takes a good story and makes it great by telling it in the most unexpected fashion. Its like he takes a regular turkey sandwich, a quality turkey sandwich, and he adds dijon mustard and spicy eggplant, but he adds them on the outside of the bread. And it’s served by an alien, who, in a surprise twist, is the narrator’s mother. These are stories that should be narrated by John Malkovich or Christopher Walken.

Everything is meta, to the point where you feel like Borges is actually writing you reading the story and you wonder if you exist at all!

Sometimes Borges gets bogged down in almost unbelievably tedious cataloguing of bibliographic details as part of the framing story. I certainly had to fight to get through some of the stories. It almost feels like he’s making fun of you with this bullshit. You’re like, can he actually think someone wants to read this? Is he putting me on?

Thankfully, they’re not all like that. The Garden of Forking Paths is one of the stories that get it right: that tell an actual coherent story, through which Borges can play his intellectual riddles within riddles, in such a way that we WANT to read the story, not just from intellectual curiosity but because we are enjoying the story. (Even when he fails, it seems like dry non-fiction: you aren’t enjoying it, but you continue because you feel driven to learn what the writer is trying to give you).

Another is The Story of the Warrior and the Captive, a wonderful tale of a German warrior who came to destroy and pillage Rome, but who, when confronted with its beauty, achievements and splendour, far beyond his comprehension, dies defending it.

            imagine him a worshiper of the Earth, of Hertha, whose covered idol went from hut to hut in a cow-drawn cart, or of the gods of war and thunder, which were crude wooden figures wrapped in homespun clothing and hung with coins and bracelets. He came from the inextricable forests of the boar and the bison; he was light-skinned, spirited, innocent, cruel, loyal to his captain and his tribe, but not to the universe. The wars bring him to Ravenna and there he sees something he has never seen before, or has not seen fully. He sees the day and the cypresses and the marble. He sees a whole whose multiplicity is not that of disorder; he sees a city, an organism composed of statues, temples, gardens, rooms, amphitheaters, vases, columns, regular and open spaces. None of these fabrications (I know) impresses him as beautiful; he is touched by them as we now would be by a complex mechanism whose purpose we could not fathom but in whose design an immortal intelligence might be divined. Perhaps it is enough for him to see a single arch, with an incomprehensible inscription in eternal Roman letters. Suddenly he is blinded and renewed by this revelation, the City. He knows that in it he will be a dog, or a child, and that he will not even begin to understand it, but he also knows that it is worth more than his gods and his sworn faith and all the marshes of Germany

He uses this to frame a twist on the story from the frontiers of Argentina, of a British women kidnapped and then assimilated to a native tribe

Borges is much more than a trickster or world-builder. He has immense range. He tells complex psychological thrillers, like Emma Zunz. One story tells of the minotaur in the labyrinth, from the point of view of the minotaur, not realizing it is a monster.

Deutsches Requiem is brilliant. A searing, haunting memoir of an unapologetic Nazi concentration camp official, one versed in philosophy and literature, charged with the guarding and extermination of one of his own favourite poets. (Search for it here, RIGHT NOW. I’ll wait.)

Borge’s works reflect Schopenhauer and Shakespeare, Kafka and Goethe, Berkeley, Nietzche and Spengler, Catholic theologians, Jewish Cabalists and the Koran. Borges is just obscenely loaded with ideas. Like this:

            Throughout the Earth there are ancient forms, forms incorruptible and eternal; any one of them could be the symbol I sought. A mountain could be the speech of the god, or a river, or the empire or the configuration of the stars.

Imagine that! A god writing his message in mountains or empires, a message meant to be decoded. Now that’s an idea! And what’s more, maybe it’s true. Maybe WE are Her message. Perhaps She is OURS.

Any great and lasting book must be ambiguous, Borges is quoted as saying in the introduction to Labyrinths; it is a mirror that makes the reader’s features known.

In the grip of Borges collections, Ficcones (8/10) and El Aleph (8.3/10), we travelled to the northernmost reaches of the country to see the spectacular be-jungle-d Iguazu Falls. This is where we first got the inkling: Argentina’s physical beauty is big, bold and beautiful. It is eye-popping. It is SO much like Borges. {You may be wondering why the A- ratings for such powerful works. The answer is, as I’ve explained above, the masses of boring bullshit Borges tends to throw in between the layers of his stories. Some of his works are just pure, spectacular gems. Others are really gems hidden in a haystack, written on one particular stick of hay.}

A half dozen ribbons of water tumble from the sky along the winding jungle paths through the national park, and then the motherload, a massive horseshoe falls stretching into Brazil, so powerful, beautiful and nuanced as to make each prior sight seem irrelevant. Again, like…

From Iguazu Falls, we crossed the length of the country to the Patagonian town of El Calafate. Patagonia—a name that touches you, one loaded in our popular subconscious. It means something, or plays on some specific nerve ending, setting off visions or feelings, like Texas or the Amazon or the Himalayas.  Patagonia! I see mountains, cowboys, red wine and tango and vast empty plains.

El Calafate, in fact, reminded me a lot of Banff back in Canada, a timber-framed tourist village with luxury spas and low-rent hostels, brew pubs and outdoor activity centres, and shops full of local-beast-stuffed-animals and gourmet chocolates, framed by an alpine backdrop. We visited stunning glaciers, rode horseback in the frigid air, and ate exquisite paella and lamb, chicken and beef parilla in the home of new friends. Asado barbecue huts are common in Argentina. In the extreme weather of deep-south Patagonia, our hosts had built theirs in a kind of playroom-garage, with games and a TV for watching rugby, and a six-foot wood-grill vented through the roof. Here, they entertain family and friends with weekly Sunday feasts. We were very lucky to be invited to one!

From nearby El Chalten, we spent our days in incredible alpine hikes. The kids survived a frigid 8-hour epic trek. It was grey and blizzardy all day, and we wondered at the point of it all, but we were rewarded for our stubbornness with a suddenly clear sky at the final viewpoint, with vistas of glaciers and the towering peaks of Chile beyond. It was a karmic, athletic and aesthetic victory. I may have had to carry one or two of the kids for the last hour or so back down to the village.

In Patagonia, I began the great late nineteenth-century epic poem The Gaucho Martin Fierro, and the sequel The Return of Martin Fierro, by José Hernández.

“I believe that Martín Fierro is the most lasting work we Argentines have written.”

Jorge Luis Borges

From an Argentina tourism website:

Martin Fierro, an epic and “gauchesque” poem which has turned into one of the iconic master pieces of Argentine literature: a must in school programs. Its author, Jos. Hernandez, was born in the province of Buenos Aires, in 1834. He was a devoted poet and journalist, exiled for having supported the wrong side during the civil war faced in the first decades of independent Argentina. He wrote about the Conquest of the Desert, and the forced recruitment of gauchos to exterminate the native people.…It was such a great success [I assume the tourist website means the book, not the genocide] that people would gather around to recite it at meetings. It has also been declared one of the most relevant Spanish American works.

I loved this work. The hero’s story felt tragic, adventurous and frighteningly common; there was a nobility to it that was dirty and sad rather than glamourous. It felt honest.

Here I come to sing to the beat of my guitar:

because a man who is kept from sleep by an uncommon sorrow

comforts himself with singing, like a solitary bird.

…

And whoever may be listening to the tale of my sorrows –

know that I never fight nor kill except when it has to be done,

and that only injustice threw me into so much adversity.

And listen to the story told by a gaucho who’s hunted by the law;

who’s been a father and husband hard-working and willing —

and in spite of that, people take him to be a criminal.

Martin Fierro (8/10) hangs over all Argentinian culture. It has been quoted in public speeches by the current Pope. It is fundamental to the national culture and consciousness. Perhaps analogous to Don Quixote in Spain, or Huckleberry Finn in the U.S.? Les Mis? Can any readers supply other works of art so baked into their national psyches?

The juxtaposition of Borges and Martin Fierro seems to me an indicator of something about the Argentinian character: there is a sophistication and formality here, a fondness for intellectual play and a lack of shame in intelligence, akin to French culture, but married to the frontier roughness, big-spirit, and machismo of the American west or rural Spain. That first feeling was very much evident in the next book.

Finally, I returned to the BOOM, our old friend, the Latin American Boom, and Julio Cortazar’s famed work, Hopscotch. To be honest, I had never heard of Cortazar or Hopscotch. I went into it with no idea of the time it was written or Cortazar’s place in the South American pantheon.

Beginning as a tale of an Argentine ex-pat in boho Paris, Hopscotch immediately seemed a cheap knock-off of  Jack Kerouac, or Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, or Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris. But especially Kerouac. It was almost an unfunny parody. Sentences that go on for pages; dollar-store, name-dropping, first-year-university-stoner philosophical ramblings; and chapter after chapter listing each song played at the party and each partier’s reactions and thoughts for each musical phrase or lyric.

Same Same, But Different

I would have dropped this book by chapter three, still vaguely describing the protagonist and his girlfriends so-bo-ho relationship. But I plugged on for you, for you.

There are times in Hopscotch where, if you really force yourself to really focus, some of these run on sentences are fun. But I just can’t focus that hard, page after page of stream-of-consciousness with no periods or paragraphs.

If all this, the predawn tapioca starting to stick to the skylight, La Maga’s so sad face as she looked at Gregorovius looking at La Maga looking at Gregorovius, Struttin’ With Some Barbecue, Babs who was crying again, hidden from Ronald who was not crying but who hid his face in the sticky smoke, the vodka transformed into a truly saintly halo, Perico the Spanish ghost up on a stool of disdain and Pavlovian stylistics, if everything were able to be extrapolated, if everything just did not exist, if he were there just so somebody (anybody, but he at the moment, because he was the one who was doing the thinking, in any case he was the one who knew that he was really thinking, eh, Cartesius, you old fuck), so that somebody could extract from all that was going on by striving and biting and especially by delving, it was hard to say how but by delving down to the very dregs, that out of all this there might pop up some grasshopper of peace, some cricket of contentment, that a person might be able to enter any gate and come into any garden, an allegorical garden as far as the others were concerned, just as mandalas are allegorical for everyone else, and in that garden he would find a flower and that flower would be La Maga, or Babs, or Wong, but described and describing itself, reconstituted outside their appearances among the Club, back to what they were, emerged, dawning, at best this all might be just a nostalgic view of the earthly paradise, an ideal of purity, except that purity had come to be inevitably the product of simplification, the bishop moves, rooks move, the knight jumps, pawns fall away, and in the center of the board, big as anthracite lions the kings remain flanked by the cleanest and last and purest of their armies, at dawn the deciding lances will be crossed, fate will be served, peace will reign. A pureness as of coitus between crocodiles, not the pureness of oh Mary my mother with dirty feet; a pureness of a slate roof with doves who naturally shit on the heads of ladies wild with rage and radishes, a pureness of … Horacio, Horacio, please. 

Make of that what you will.

So you read in a fog and then wake up in the middle of some metaphor or allegory where everyone at the party is a flower or chess piece or toilet paper brand on a shelf at the supermarket and, like the Talking Heads you ask, How did I get here?

By chapter 28 we get our first really well-carved dramatic scene, although it makes the protagonist even more unattractive: the usual gang of idiots is at a party at the chief boho couple’s apartment. The boyfriend, and gradually the rest of the gang, realize the girlfriend’s baby, which has been sick for days, is dead in his crib. And they all attempt to carry on the usual drinking and banter with this incredible tension underlying it as they wait for the mother to understand what they all do:

Now we shall have fifteen minutes of chain reactions which no one will be able to avoid, no one, not even by thinking that next year, at this very same hour, the most exact and detailed memory will not be capable of changing the output of adrenalin or saliva, the sweat on the palms of the hands … 

Finally, after that all hits the fan, and the break-up and the descending into some real muck, the protagonist escapes back to Argentina. The story turns here, and becomes a bit more readable. The characters almost sweet. Another kindle note: 200 pages in and genuine lightness and likeability

During his reading hours, which were between one and five o’clock in the morning, but not every morning, he had come to the disconcerting conclusion that whistling was not an important theme in literature. 

Then, the experimentalish: after fifty or so chapters, culminating in an actual story-like climax, there are the bonus non-linear chapters! Yay! Somehow we are meant to start over, and read the books in a wholly new order (proscribed at the end of each chapter, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book with just one option), but now incorporating thirty or so new chapters. The new stuff seems to be mostly more random wordy meditations on the meaning of life… and meaning of meaning. Because there wasn’t enough of that in the first 56 chapters. This is basically the second string meditations, the stuff that couldn’t be shoehorned into the story itself.

OK. As much as I mock Cortazar’s self-indulgence, he does have the guts and memory and skill to bring his youth and its drama to life in spots. The ability to take those tiny moments or periods of our life that seem so epic at the time, but that we can never tell of, for fear of rendering them embarrassing and small. He remembers, and he tells them, and they work. Anyway… 5.5/10.

And finally, there is this:

Stopping in front of a pizzeria at 1300 Corrientes, Oliveira asked himself the great question: “Must one stay in the center of the crossroads, then, like the hub of a wheel? What good is it to know or to think we know that every road is false if we don’t walk with an idea that is not the road itself? We’re not Buddha, and there are no trees here to sit under in the lotus position. 

I read this line on the flight out of Argentina the day after a final dinner of pizza on Corrientes! Probably within a few blocks of Cortezar’s pizzeria. In a city of 16 million people counting suburbs, this is a mystical coincidence. Mystic pizza.

*when a ‘national’ cultural exhibition is chiefly performed for tourists, is it really a part of the national culture?

Pre-amble:

I’ve taken a travel year with my family, heading more or less East until we find ourselves back in Quebec (or prove the Flat-Earthers correct!) I’ve always liked to read something from the places I travel to, and I thought it would make a fun quest to explore the world simultaneously through the books of each country we visit. Like a literary Anthony Bourdain.

Of course, we can’t pretend to understand a culture from a few books; we aren’t going to catalyze a series of epiphanies and insights here… …no, OK, we can pretend. And pretending is fun. And cultures are different. Arts are different. Sensibilities and worldview differ. What a boring world it would be otherwise!

And if this project doesn’t turn up any cultural insights — which I’ll be honest, insights are pretty far between for me — it will still be fun. So let’s go.

Amble:

Peru: land of mystery!

The biggest of which is: who to read? It turned out, Peru has it’s own literary giant, almost comparable to Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez in terms of world and domestic stature, and poetic-polysyllabic nomenclature: Maria Vargos Llosa! That name just tastes great, doesn’t it? Say it out loud. It also doesn’t rhyme with anything. The closest are bossa nova, cosa nostra and Operation Barbarossa. And so, I gave up on my plans to write this instalment as a ballad.

Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vargos Llosa is a Nobel prize winner and a giant of the 1960’s Latin American Boom in literature. He once ran for president. (Although he lost, the winner went on to become a jailed ex-dictator. MVL went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Talk about your Pyrrhic defeats!)

Mario Vargas Llosa, the literary Machu Picchu of Peru, would be my taster menu for this leg of our trip.

Peru is three countries for the price of one, each with its own culture, language, and ethnicity. First, the coastal areas: Catholic, Spanish-speaking, mainly populated by the mestizo or direct descendants of Spanish colonialists (or German or Italian immigrants). Then, the Andean mountains, formerly the homeland of the Inkas, now of their descendants. Spanish and Catholicism are rule the cities, but Quechua and older religions still hold the villages. Finally, the Amazon basin, where dozens of tribes, some still uncontacted, retain much of their language, culture and physical characteristics.

Almost unique in the Western world, in much of Peru, indigenous cultures are dominant. It was (fictional) Peruvian lore that gave the faux-authenticity to the The Celestine Prophecy. Remember that? Not too prophetic, was it? Or could it be that the Trump Era is the Age of Aquarius? Mind blown. There is, actually, a thriving shamanic-tourism industry in Peru. I wrote for Smoke about my own experience in an ayahuasca ceremony when I visited over fifteen years ago. But that wasn’t what we were here for this time.

The family arrived in Lima from Medellin. We were to meet up with my wife’s people who were joining us for a couple of weeks of jungle and mountain touring. I just had time to read up on Vargos Llosa, scanning his huge catalogue to decide where to jump in first. And enjoy the surfing and sushi. Lima sushi is a transcendent experience.

As it turned out, Vargos Llosa had, among his novels, several that dealt deeply with these regional flavours, and the indigenous/ Western dichotomy.

I hadn’t planned on reading an Amazon book in the Amazon, but looking through MVL’s works, and finding an Amazon novel with amazing Amazon reviews, was too much to pass up. Celestine-level synchronicity.

At a glance, The Storyteller seemed to deal with indigenous culture, shamanism and storytelling, which was like putting an all-you-can-eat in front of Diego Maradona. I began reading it as we flew from Lima to Iquitos, the Amazonian metropolis, the largest city in the world with no road connections, and contender for the world’s MTTPC crown (Most Tuk-Tuk’s Per Capita). I was reading it as we boated several hours down the brown Amazon to our isolated, off-the-grid lodge.

It’s brilliant. Built around a double-narrative, The Storyteller‘s main storyline has the narrator recounting his lifetime fascination and involvement with an Amazonian tribe, the Machiguengas, a relationship brought about by a friend of the narrator. This friend, Saul, nicknamed Mascarita due to his hideous facial colouring, was the first to become involved with the tribe. The second storyline, told in alternating chapters, is of a shaman’s experiences, as told to other tribe members.

In addition to ambitiously trying to represent a shamanistic worldview, The Storyteller spins a great yarn. It deals with the schism between indigenous and Western world views with nuance and intelligence. It looks at it anthropologically, philosophically, economically, politically. It looks at it abstractly from a thousand feet, and practically, in your face. It mashes in themes and ideas like beauty and ugliness; Judaism; Kafka (and a bird named Gregor Samsa); and much more. Perhaps most importantly, the power of storytelling. But all in service to the yarn.

This is a book rich in story and idea.

Here’s a scene from early in the book, with Saul returning from a visit, explaining Machiguenga culture to the narrator in a Lima tavern.

The most important thing to them was serenity. Never to make mountains out of molehills or tempests in teapots. Any sort of emotional upheaval had to be controlled, for there is a fatal   correspondence between the spirit of man and the spirits of Nature, and any violent disturbance in the former causes some catastrophe in the latter.

“A man throwing a fit can make a river overflow, and a murder make lightning burn down the village. Perhaps that bus crash on the Avenida Arequipa this morning was caused by your punching that drunk yesterday. Doesn’t your conscience trouble you?” 

The main storyline is told as a meditation on the part of the narrator, decades later, still trying to come to grips with his friend’s sudden, apparently planned, disappearance into the jungle (a kind of Into the Wild/ Grey Owl-thing). The narrator is unravelling a personal mystery, the circumstances and psychology of Mascarita’s dissapearance.

I think it is true to say that in those last months we never again had those endless dialogues, with both of us speaking our minds freely and frankly, that had been so frequent between 1953 and 1956. If we had kept them up, would he have opened his heart to me and allowed me to glimpse what his intentions were? Most likely not. The sort of decision arrived at by saints and madmen is not revealed to others. It is forged little by little, in the folds of the spirit, tangential to reason, shielded from indiscreet eyes, not seeking the approval of others—who would never grant it—until it is at last put into practice. I imagine that in the process—the conceiving of a project and its ripening into action—the saint, the visionary, or the madman isolates himself more and more, walling himself up in solitude, safe from the intrusion of others.

A recurring idea is of the Machiguenga tribal storyteller, la habladore. The narrator learns of them, not from Mascarita, but from his own work with the Machiguenga for a documentary TV series he produced. We understand then, that the alternative narrative is of one of these habladores.

I was deeply moved by the thought of that being, those beings, in the unhealthy forests of eastern Cusco and Madre de Dios, making long journeys of days or weeks, bringing stories from one group of Machiguengas to another and taking away others, reminding each member of the tribe that the others were alive, that despite the great distances that separated them, they still formed a community, shared a tradition and beliefs, ancestors, misfortunes and joys: the fleeting, perhaps legendary figures of those habladores who—by occupation, out of necessity, to satisfy a human whim—using the simplest, most time-hallowed of expedients, the telling of stories, were the living sap that circulated and made the Machiguengas into a society, a people of interconnected and interdependent beings. It still moves me to think of them, and even now, here, as I write these lines, in the Caffe Strozzi in old Firenze, under the torrid July sun, I break out in goose pimples.

 “And why is it you break out in goose pimples?” Mascarita said. “What is it you find so fascinating? What’s so special about habladores?”

A good question. Why hadn’t I been able to get them out of my mind since that night?

“They’re a tangible proof that storytelling can be something more than mere entertainment,” it occurred to me to say to him. “Something primordial, something that the very existence of a people may depend on. Maybe that’s what impressed me so. One doesn’t always know why one is moved by things, Mascarita. They strike some secret chord, and that’s that.”

Here, the narrator offers his own take on why I am so impressed with Vargos Llosa’s balls:

Talking the way a storyteller talks means being able to feel and live in the very heart of that culture, means having penetrated its essence, reached the marrow of its history and mythology, given body to its taboos, images, ancestral desires, and terrors.

The Storyteller rates a solid 8.4/10. As for our little tribe, we spent our time in the Amazon hiking the jungle and listening to the stories of our guide, Paul. Paul leads expeditions for scientists and documentary makers deep in the jungle. He’s had close encounters with jaguars, anacondas, boa constrictors, bushmasters, and giant alligators, and laughs at the Wikipedia-listed max size for the beasts.

Paul took us piranha fishing, using bits of raw beef as bait, on hooks hung from bamboo poles. They were biting all afternoon, filling a bucket.

That evening, we returned to the same creek to swim with the river dolphins as the sun set. It was glorious—terrifying, beautiful and refreshing, all at once. The local tribes have a legend (per Paul) that the pink dolphins steal women from the villages, and the women become pink dolphins and never come back.

One night we went for a back-water boat ride in a long, low wooden boat. We had only our headlamps, just catching glimpses of the gnarly, entangled limbs of trees, and flashes of the green vines and lily pads that carpet the surface of the water.  It was hella creepy. We were looking for the glimmering eyes of Cayman alligators. Suddenly, Paul dives from the boat, splashing into the water and disappearing. Holy shit!, every one of us thought. A moment later, he climbed back on board, grinning from ear to ear, holding a baby Cayman for us to admire.

At the end of our Amazon stay, an hour or so out of Iquitos, I get cell service. Tennis scores. Upcoming hotel info. Contract stuff on an audiobook. And a bunch of crap. Just three days off the internet, and I think it’s the longest in a year, since my last camping trip.

After the serendipitous synchronicity of The Storyteller in the Amazon, it happened that the next book of MVL’s that I was most interested in, as we flew to the ancient Andean city of Cuzco, was Death in the Andes. I’ve been on a murder-mystery kick (Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane…), as I’m working on one myself (I mean, a novel, not trying to solve an actual murder). So Death in the Andes was doubly-synchronous, and again, the on-line reviews and plot were enticing.

Like The Storyteller, Death in the Andes is told through a dual-narrative: the first is the buddy-detective story, a senior and junior cop unraveling a series of disappearances at their remote outpost by a highway work camp. In the backdrop of the mystery, the communist Sendero Luminoso terrorists; the vicious cocaine cartels; massive landslides; and the angry spirits invoked by the camp’s superstitious residents are ‘out there’, ready to drop in and destroy these two completely isolated cops at any time.

Finally, the voice of the adjutant rang in Lituma’s ears as if he were offering condolences: “I’ll tell you something. You and I won’t get out of here alive. They have us surrounded, what’s the point of kidding ourselves?”

Lituma shrugged. Usually he was the one who felt demoralized, and Carreño had to cheer him up. Today they had changed places.

“Don’t brood about it, Tomasito. Otherwise, when they do come, we’ll be in such bad shape we won’t even be able to defend ourselves.”

The wind rattled the sheets of tin on the roof, and little gushes of rain spattered the interior of the cabin. Surrounded by a protective stockade of sacks filled with stones and dirt, their quarters consisted of a single room divided by a wooden screen.

This storyline is intercut with a sexy-tale the junior cop tells the senior cop in a series of lights-out bedtime conversations, a story told brilliantly around the interjections of the audience of the senior cop in the dark:

“Oh God, before they come and kill us, let me fuck a woman just one more time,” Lituma pleaded. “Son of a bitch, since I came to Naccos I’ve been living like a eunuch. And your stories about the Piuran get me hot, Tomasito.”

This time, a third element is introduced: marginally related, contemporary events involving the Sendero Luminoso, each showing another brutal encounter in the region, maximizing the tension and fear we feel for these poor cops, waiting night after night to be butchered in their sleep.

In one of the Sendero-terror postcards, a young French tourist couple is pulled from the night bus to Cuzco at a militia roadblock, and pummelled to death by rocks. So… two months in, our trip is going better than that! (Weirdly: I published my novel Safari months before this trip. In the opening scene, a young American tourist couple are pulled from the night bus to Nairobi at a questionable roadblock during a time of civil strife, a scene I’d taken from real-life life experience. Had Vargas Llosa been reading my letters from the future?)

The line between past and present, myth and life feels blurred for any visitor in the high altitude of Cuzco and around, helping along the storytelling, supercharging it with immersive actual-reality atmosphere. It is the former capital of the Inka Empire; you see the remnants of their great buildings, and feel their ghosts in the alleys. We went horseback riding in the mountains, visiting caves used as ancient temples. Worshippers today still come and make offerings or burn coca leaves to honour the god of the moon and Pachamama, the earth goddess.

Death in the Andes has a bacchanalian feel, of superstition mingling with orgiastic loss of self. There’s something mystical and mythic fizzing in your brain as you read. Yet more synchronicty—I had just downloaded Euripedes’ The Bacchae to read, in which Dionysus, god of ecstasy and epiphany visits Thebes. One of the main suspects in the central mystery, the keeper of the work camp cantina, is Dionisio. He and his witch-like wife are the gateway between our policemen’s modern urban psyches and the ancient animist world of the mountains.

Here’s a section on the local vampire myth, as told by Dionisio’s wife:

The pishtaco can cut out your insides and you won’t even notice or feel any pain. That’s what Stud did, and starting that night Sebastián began to lose weight, and he got smaller and forgot everything he knew. Just like Juan Apaza. And finally he died too. That’s what happened back when Naccos made its living from the Santa Rita mine, and that’s what’s happening now, when Naccos makes its living from the highway. Misfortune won’t come from the terrucos who are executing so many people or taking them away to be in their militia. Or from the pishtacos that are wandering around. Sure, they always come when times are hard, the Ayacucho invasion proves that. There must be a few around here, in the caves in those hills, collecting their supply of human fat. They must need it down in Lima, or in the United States, to grease the new machines, the rockets they send to the moon. They say no gasoline or oil can make all those scientific inventions work like the fat of a serrano.

And here, she describes the real meaning of dance.

…forgetting yourself, leaving yourself, until you feel that the dance is dancing you, that it’s deep inside you, that it commands and you obey, this is the path to wisdom. You are no longer yourself, I am no longer myself but all the others. That’s how we leave the prison of the body and enter the world of the spirits. By singing. Dancing. Drinking, too, naturally. You travel when you’re drunk, Dionisio says, you pay a visit to your animal, you shake off worry, you discover your secret, you become who you really are. The rest of the time you’re in prison, like the corpses in the ancient tombs or the cemeteries we have today. You’re somebody’s slave or servant, always. When we’re dancing and drinking, there are no Indians, no mestizos, no white señores, no rich or poor, no men or women. The differences are wiped away and we become like spirits: Indians, mestizos, señores, rich and poor, women and men. Not everybody travels when they dance or sing or drink, only the best ones. You have to have a will for it and lose your pride and shame and come down from the pedestal where people have put themselves. The man who doesn’t put his thoughts to sleep, who doesn’t forget himself, or throw off his vanity and pride, or become the music when he sings and the dance when he dances and drunkenness when he drinks—that man does not leave his prison, does not travel, does not pay a visit to his animal or rise up to become spirit. That man does not live: he is decay, he is the living dead.
And he cannot nourish the spirits of the mountains, either. They want first-rate creatures who have freed themselves from their slavery.

8.6/10. The Storyteller gets extra marks for ambition, but Death in the Andes is just so intense, and takes you almost as far into another world as The Storyteller.

After some time in Cuzco, we hiked the Inka Trail, winding higher and higher on the mountainside over the Urabamba river, the trail sides dropping into sheer cliffs in sections. Naturally, my 10-year-old boy and his cousin decided this would be a good time to do races. The end of the trail is a brutal stone staircase, known as the gringo-killer, up to the Sun Gate, the first viewpoint of Machu Picchu itself, the hundreds-year old royals-only entrance. I’d been here almost twenty years earlier. I was contending with the ghost of my younger self as well. This happens more and more as I age.

Machu Picchu is a vast, crumbling stone complex, some six hundred years old. As ruins go, it may not be the grandest. But location is everything. Machu Picchu seems spotlighted by the sun in the only land clear of the jungle clinging to the mountains that surround it. It juts out from clifftop terraces that are the only flat land in view, and at the edges plunge hundreds of metres to the river foaming in a white, mute ribbon below. The iconic pillar of Huayna Picchu rises above it in the background. It feels like adventure.

I’d built Machu Picchu up for seventeen years to my wife. It is a place that you can’t oversell.

Returning to Cuzco, my wife and I sat on a second-floor pub patio, looking out over the main Colonial-era square. There was another second-floor patio kitty-cornered from us, and we saw a patron accidentally knock a plastic mustard bottle off the railing. The bottle smashed on the sidewalk, spraying the pants of a grizzled old tourist and his female companion. He looked quite a bit like Jeremy Corbyn. The guy spent the next half hour outraged, shaking his fist up at the patio, and showing everyone who passed by the stain on his butt. Finally, he got the police. You could see their poker faces as he explained the seriousness of the crime. He dragged them into the bar. They never came out. I can only imagine they ditched the idiot and got drunk instead.

What else can I say about these books? Not only was Vargas Llosa a superior writer to Garcia Marquez, he also mocked him as a Castro bootlick in the 70’s; once threw a punch at him in a Mexico City cinema (apparently over a woman); and covered the Spain World Cup. Game, set, match, Vargas Llosa.

(Another gratuitous The Producers reference, from Franz Liebekind, author of Springtime for Hitler: “Hitler was better looking than Churchill. He was a better dresser than Churchill. He had more hair!  He told funnier jokes! And he could dance the pants off of Churchill!”)

Peru is a place of big experiences: the Amazon, the Andes, Cuzco, Machu Picchu. Colombia was a place that was simply, exquisitely beautiful to be in. I could stretch this as a metaphor: Vargas Llosa books are adventures that stick. Garcia Marquez are… nah, it doesn’t work.

#TeamVargasLlosa

One day in Puno, on the shore of Lake Titicaca, my kids tell me of the fantastic moments in their respective books the night before (Harry Potter for the boy and Land of Stories for the girl). Jaw-dropping, story-turning moments they needed to tell immediately, breathlessly. It made me so happy.

When I am back in my world, I will read Vargas Llosa again. He has a massive body of work, and I can’t wait to dive back in.

But that’s a loooooong ways away. See you next time in Argentina.