The Planets

by Sergio Chejfec, Heather Cleary (Translator)

A 2013 Best Translated Book Award Finalist When he reads about a mysterious explosion in the distant countryside, the narrator's thoughts turn to his disappeared childhood friend, M, who was abducted from his home years ago, during a spasm of political violence in Buenos Aires in the early 1970s. He convinces himself that M must have died in this explosion, and he begins to tell the story of their friendship through a series interconnected vignettes, hoping in this way to reanimate his friend and relive the time they spent together wandering the streets of Buenos Aires. Sergio Chejfec's The Planets is an affecting and innovative exploration of mourning, remembrance, and friendship by one of Argentina's modern masters. Sergio Chejfec , originally from Argentina, has published numerous works of fiction, poetry, and essays. Among his grants and prizes, he has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in 2007 and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2000. He teaches at NYU. Heather Cleary is a translator of fiction, criticism, and poetry. In 2005, she was awarded a Translation Fund grant from the PEN American Center for her work on Oliverio Girondo.

Genres: Fiction, Spanish Literature, Latin American, 21st Century, Literature, Friendship

227 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Sergio Chejfec is an Argentine Jewish writer. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1956. From 1990 to 2005 he lived in Venezuela, where he published Nueva sociedad, a journal of politics, culture and the social sciences. He currently lives in New York City and teaches in the Creative Writing program in Spanish at New York University.

Chejfec has written novels, essays and a poetry collection. His works include Lenta biografía (1990), Los planetas (1999), Boca de lobo (2000), Los incompletos (2004), Baroni: un viaje (2007), Mis dos mundos (2008), and La experiencia dramática (2012). He has been compared to Juan José Saer, which he finds flattering but not accurate. His novels usually feature a slow-paced narration that interweaves a minimal plot with reflection. Memory, political violence, and Jewish-Argentine culture and history are some of the recurring themes in his work.

Reviews

[João Reis · Rating 2 out of 5]

A good book about friendship, identity, and political violence and terror. Sometimes it drags too much and I would prefer a bit more action and less introspection, and a bit of humor, too. So, overall, it's a quite boring book. Excellent translation.

[Chad Post · Rating 4 out of 5]

DISCLAIMER: I am the publisher of the book and thus spent approximately two years reading and editing and working on it. So take my review with a grain of salt, or the understanding that I am deeply invested in this text and know it quite well. Also, I would really appreciate it if you would purchase this book, since it would benefit Open Letter directly.

Not really as tight as "My Two Worlds," but maybe more emotionally gripping. I love Heather Cleary's translation, and all the little stories that the narrator recounts from his childhood friend, especially the one about the eye and the railroad tracks. (I hope that sounds intriguing.)

It's kind of hard to review our own books on here, but I just want to say that I'm extremely proud that we took a chance on Sergio and signed on three of his books way back when. He's a fantastic writer, and one whose reputation will surely grow as more people encounter him and more books become available.

[Christopher Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisite, start to finish. Seriously some of the finest writing on memory and loss I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading.

The Planets was my first Sergio Chejfec, and most certainly will not be my last. I’m blown away. This one will stick with me for a very, very long time.

[Madeleine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uneven, ultimately — parts of it are lovely, deeply felt and engaging, and parts are not, failing alternately for being too vague or too explicit. Too many connections are explained which should have been left to intuit, and too much time is spent talking about silence when some actual silence would have sufficed. I'm left with the suspicion that this book isn't quite about what Chejfec thinks it's about, that the Sebaldian meditations on identity, memory, and the city, are ultimately weightless and beside the point. I like Chejfec's style and I look forward to reading his future books, but I wish that he would stop trying to write like Sebald and write more like himself. He's a surprisingly good storyteller (this was something I never managed to realize in My Two Worlds), and a better storyteller than philosopher. The existential conclusions the book draws are disappointingly obvious and do not explain the book (as if the book itself were a planet that could not see the star it was orbiting).

P.S. I won my copy of this book through a GoodReads giveaway, so would like to thank Open Letter for that, and for their general fabulousness.

[Elisabeth Goemans · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Muchas veces con M habíamos hablado sobre esto: el ser, la identidad, la verdad se muestran y prevalecen con intermitencia, jamás son permanentes ni constantes." (270)

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won’t pretend to completely understand everything that is going on in The Planets. Despite that, I can appreciate that with its publication by Open Letter Books, Sergio Chejfec has presented English readers with a gentle novel on friendship, grief and loss. It is, ostensibly, a collection of memories told to us by the narrator about his childhood friend, M. M was abducted during Argentina’s Dirty War. He disappeared, his fate unknown, leaving his friends and family in a kind of limbo. (Sergio Chejfec has stated that the book is in part based on a real life friend who did disappear in the 1970′s). Some years later the narrator reads in the newspaper about an explosion outside of Buenos Aires. He believes, for no good reason and without evidence as far as I can see, that M was killed in it. What he has come to see as confirmation of M’s death unleashes the flood of memories which make up The Planets. Eventually leading him to some kind of closure.

Memories are not bound by the law of causality, linear space or time. And so we are forced to follow the disorganized train of the narrator’s thoughts. Interspersed between the memories of M are other, related, memories – an encounter the narrator has with his and M’s mutual friend, meeting M’s mother after the abduction, stories told to him by M and M’s father. It becomes tricky keeping track. This meandering stream-of-conscious style was also present in My Two Worlds, but the geography of the park in which that narrator walked provided a structure. Structure which I badly missed in The Planets…. at least in the early chapters. Coming to terms with the lack of a lineal storytelling is a hurdle that has to be overcome in order to appreciate this novel.

Like The Catcher in the Rye, The Planets is obliquely about grief. Like Salinger, Chejfec plays this information close to the chest. He engulfs you in his narrator’s subconscious, leaving you to experience first hand the strange distance combined with an eery connection that exists between the person lost and the other left. Holden Caulfield mentions his dead brother briefly in passing, but his loneliness informs every line of the novel. The narrator of The Planets has assembled a montage of memories, yet his connection to M (he eventually acknowledges) is stretching and becoming tenuous. To confuse matters, his memories of M are mixed with fictional stories he’s come to associate with the friendship. Some of those stories are split into parts, appearing at random intervals through the course of the book. It’s often difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction, but the experience of the narrator attempting to hold on to his grief and, through the emotion of grief his friend, is recognizable and feels real in its very ambiguity. Heather Cleary, the translator, has done a remarkable job of capturing what she refers to as a “certain – productive – dissonance” in the text.*

A highlight of The Planets, which is foremost a novel of ideas, is the narrator’s explanation of how the static existence (or non-existence) of M, created by his disappearance and the mystery of his fate, has changed the orbits the two young men once traveled in relation to each other. Chejfec continuously references space, gravity, stars and the planets. The ongoing metaphor that he’s created is startling because it is so beautiful.


Sergio Chejfec seems to have an attachment to the cosmos, as demonstrated by his choice of titles. My Two Worlds, The Planets, and the upcoming The Dark, seem too pointed to be coincidental. As more of his books are translated into English, perhaps the significance (if one exists) will come to light. Which segues nicely into why I find Chejfec’s writing interesting and exciting. There’s so much there to explore. These aren’t books to be quickly consumed and, just as quickly, forgotten. The Planets will linger, frustrate and engage – demanding you return to it to fully understood and appreciate its many layers (for example, I haven’t even touched on the political aspect of the wartime setting). This is what I like best about Sergio Chejfec’s novels – like the great classics of literature they live and grow with the reader. As such, they are never finished.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sergio Chejfec writes:

Neither of us would have imagined that, years later, these events would be written down on paper. If we had foreseen this, we would have acted differently, guiding our steps according to our idea of posterity; fortunately, we did not. (This foreseeing should be clarified, however, given that if M knew the reasons why I would end up writing these pages, he certainly would have done what was needed to avoid his abduction, though, in fact, he did nothing at all to cause it. They say that one could avoid innumerable problems, mistakes, and catastrophes if one knew how things were going to turn out, but this is an impossible dream. The most extreme example of this is that we are all certain of death – and even, expanding things a bit, about the decline of civilization, the destruction of the environment, and the inevitable ostracism of the sun – but are still unable to avoid the end. What keeps us from losing hope in the fact of this inescapable truth? A belief in the interim, in the fact that, in the meantime, things happen that are worth experiencing.)

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

A surprisingly moving story of mourning written in a meandering, dense, philosophical style that touches on political, religious, and social themes, with lots of ideas about how humans interact with space around them, both in terms of geographic space, especially in how humans construct and are constructed by cities ("Captives of geography, our past is shaped by the city."), and in terms of outer space: "(Because the same mystery that moves the planets also impels people.)"

And it has to be noted that Heather Cleary's translation is remarkable--the style of this book is daunting and can seem impenetrable, but her rendering gives a beautiful rhythm within the long sentences and chunky paragraphs.

A great book, I'd recommend reading Chejfec's My Two Worlds before reading The Planets, it is a more tightly composed narrative that can get you inside Chejfec's amazing head a little easier.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very definitely not a book to be rushed through. It demands to be mulled over slowly. Very digressive and meditative. I found it to have much the same conceptual content as a lot of the poetry I've been reading lately.

[Julianne (Leafling Learns・Outlandish Lit) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very strange and surreal book. I don't really know how to explain the plot, so I'll let the publisher do it for me:

When he reads about a mysterious explosion in the distant countryside, the narrator’s thoughts turn to his disappeared childhood friend, M, who was abducted from his home years ago, during a spasm of political violence in Buenos Aires in the early 1970s. He convinces himself that M must have died in this explosion, and he begins to tell the story of their friendship through a series interconnected vignettes, hoping in this way to reanimate his friend and relive the time they spent together wandering the streets of Buenos Aires.

Ok, that sounds about right. But this book isn't so much about the politics in Buenos Aires. This book is about memory, friendship, and loss. The narrator goes over many different segmented memories of himself and his time with his friend, M. The book meanders around, sharply focusing on certain instances for a while, then tumbles right into a new memory. I was tugged about by the narrator's thoughts, not by any real chronology. The unconventional structure was difficult at first, but it sort of parallels how memories really are.

The Planets was definitely a slow read, but I do believe that it was worth it. Sometimes I would get so wrapped up in the strange stories told about M, or told by M with no apparent connection to any reality, that I wouldn't be able to stop thinking about them for the rest of the day. They seem hard to tie together as you're reading them, but taking the time to concentrate while reading definitely becomes worth it by the end. The narrator comes more clearly into focus, time starts to align, and we essentially see the impact of M's disappearance. I almost gave up on the book at the beginning, but I'm glad that I didn't.

If you have the time to slowly read, and you don't mind a bit of philosophizing, I think this book is worth a shot. Especially if you have weird hang ups about/interest in memory. Like I do.

Full review: http://outlandishlit.blogspot.com/201...

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book. It deals with elegy through memory, and speculation through memory. Pinochet's regime and the masses of disappeared hover just outside of the periphery for most of the book, and only comes into focus at strategic and thoughtful points in the digressions. What this is about is incidental compared to how he talks about, to, and through his memories of his friend.

A good portion of the book is the narrator relating his memory of his interaction with his friend M., who by accounts that he respects, is the one who should have been a writer. It is always ambiguous as to what their ages are when they speak to each other, and there is a section near the beginning where it feels unbelievable that kids would speak to each others in this way, and with this level of prescience, but the power of the turnaround in the story he tells about them as children around pg. 45-60 is worth the setup and ambiguity. Ambiguity in memory is drawn upon quite heavily in here. When the ages of the characters truly matter, to place them in a specific historical point, Chejfec does it very well. The introduction of the third character, Sito, as a pivot between them, and in the historical context, is nearly perfectly done.

Heather Cleary deserves absolute praise and encouragement for her translation of this book. I am so happy that she is translating the next one that will be released in English, called The Dark.

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

6/5 ⭐️

[Leonard Klossner · Rating 4 out of 5]

A return to Chejfec and his wandering narrators. This novel, like Chejfecs others, centers on the thoughts and memories of a perambulating narrator, although the duty of narration seems to be shared with (presumably) memory itself in certain scenes, denoted by italics. The prose seems melancholy as always - this is perhaps unavoidable when contending with memory, one of the most fragile, delicate, and at once both marvelous and tragic aspects of our existence - leaving one to imagine the perambulating narrator looking out at the sensory world and looking inward to the illusory reality of memories with a somber expression.

A somber expression quite deserved, since the cause for the narrator's wonderings centers on the disappearance of a friend, known as M, who was kidnapped amidst political turmoil in Buenos Aires, and who the narrator imagines dies in an explosion occurring early in the narrative. Distance figures heavily in the narrator's musings. It is distance which gives a journey its purpose. It is distance which makes the arrival worthwhile. It is distance which allows the images of one's past to flower from the soil of memory.

Distance and distance alone is the paramount condition for the very existence of the narrative: Without M's disappearance and supposed death - without the enigma of his absence; his distance from his friend like the unfathomable and immeasurable distance of one planet from another - there would be no occasion for the existence of the text.

"The truth is, there comes a time when the recovery of memories becomes a path riddled with obstacles." Our memories form a sort of narrative of our lives, and we make sense of our experience and piece each fragmentary memory of our life into the grand mosaic through stories, through retellings and recollections of moments long or recently past. It is with some despair that we might recognize these records as a sort of fiction since they are of doubtful authorship, and since their authenticity remains indisputably in question; since we cannot trust memory to serve as an objective record of experience. But we may enjoy our memories as a sort of lived fiction, each of them pieced together like pearls on a fraying string, or pieced across multiple lengths of thread like vignettes, like chapters of the life of a character bearing a name identical to our own. This is what I believe The Planets means to emphasize: A return to what has passed, a return to memory as an attempt to make sense of the chaos and indeterminacy of the present; an encounter with the fiction of a life lived and still living.

[Michael Suire · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very poorly written, I don’t see any redeeming qualities to it: The stories just drag on and on, are very simplistic, the characters are just air... Worst of all, all this is wrapped in a self important, faux high brow Freudian barnish that attempts, but deeply fails, to convey depth. Oh so boring.

[Full Stop]

http://www.full-stop.net/2012/10/09/r...

Review by Tyler Malone

“Neither of us would have imagined that, years later, these events would be written down on paper,” explains the narrator of Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets. The us the narrator is referring to includes the narrator himself, whose name we never learn, and his childhood friend, referred to simply as M: “M for Miguel, or Mauricio; it could also be M for Daniel since, as we know, any name at all can reside behind letters.” M is the central figure of his friend’s narrative, the enigmatic focal point around which the narrator’s digressions circle. He exists in excess, but also in negation — a simultaneous presence and absence that forms the thematic backbone of the book.

M was “disappeared,” abducted during a period of political unrest in 1970s Buenos Aires, and the novel begins with a mysterious explosion years later. For some reason, the narrator comes to the odd conclusion that M, who has been missing without a trace, must have died in the explosion. Thus, the narrator is “offered the only possibility of an ending.” And yet that “ending” is also a “beginning,” as it becomes the impetus of the narrator’s impassioned remembrances and intellectual wanderings that orbit the ghost-like M. “A sense of loyalty to his memory leads me to write,” the narrator confesses. Yet memory, as we quickly learn, is a problematic thing, one that is endlessly fallible:

I feel unable to attribute any tangible trait, even a trivial one, to M; a feature, a gesture or expression, a past, a family, affect, et cetera. A reflected image that has slowly given way to negation, to shadow. The effect is unreal, and this unreal effect makes his life seem not only improbable, but also incidental. Did M exist? Yes, I say. But what was his time on earth like? It is all conjecture, I reasoned, the more time passes, the less I know. This lack of knowledge has nothing to do with forgetting, though that is what we call it, nor with the length of his absence, but rather with its excess.

Read more here: http://www.full-stop.net/2012/10/09/r...

[Leonardo]

En el comienzo de Los planetas, Sergio Chejfec escribió: "Aquella noticia hablaba de restos humanos esparcidos por una extensa superficie. Hay una palabra que lo describemuy bien: regados. Miembros regados, repartidos, ordenados en círculos imaginarios del centro inequívoco, la explo­sión. Hacia cualquier lado que uno fuese, todavía a cientos de metros podía toparse con rastros, que por otra parte ya no eran más que señales mudas, aptas tan sólo para el epílogo: los cuerpos deshechos después de haber sufrido, separados en trozos y dispersos". La noticia abre un escenario de muerte que nunca fue descripto de ese modo. La novela queda marcada de allí en más por ese paisaje de restos humanos dispersos, que se corresponde con la desaparición del amigo. La potencia de la descripción sostiene algo que no pudo pasar por la experiencia sino por la imaginación que trabajó sobre indicios mínimos, suposiciones, los resultados del "sueño de la razón" represora. Esas líneas breves rodean el cráter, la desaparición del amigo, alrededor de la cual, pero no sobre ella, se extenderá la novela. Es innecesario saber si Chejfec se remite a una dimensión autobiográfica, porque la fuerza de la escena no depende de eso.

Tiempo Pasado Pág.164-165

[Susanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Planets is a difficult book to review. It took me a while to get into the writing, but once I did, I enjoyed the author's style. Plot-wise, though, the novel meandered all over the place. Normally I don't particularly mind this, but it seemed like periods of lucid anecdotes and other stories alternated with vague, rather confusing episodes of abstraction and philosophizing. I enjoyed the stories and anecdotes, not so much the rest of the content. I almost perpetually felt like there was some deeper meaning to everything that I was missing.

For the sake of the concrete storytelling, though, let's go with a four-star (enjoyed it) rating. Both the anecdotes of M's and the narrator's lives, as well as the stories told by M and his father, were interesting at, at times, even engrossing when combined with Chejfec's excellent writing style. Parts of the book had an almost magical realist quality that I love in novels, though in this case it exists in the absence of any tangible magic or supernatural elements. This will be a book that I re-read in later years, hopefully to catch some of the more abstract intricacies that I missed on the first read-through.

Thank you to First Look and the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Aaron (Typographical Era) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mourning is such a profoundly strange and selfish process for an individual to work through. We grieve not for the loss of the person who has disappeared from this world, but instead for our own personal loss with regards to what their existence meant to us. It’s never about all of the things that they’ll never again have the opportunity to enjoy and is always about their inability to no longer enjoy these things with us. Their life has ended, but we must continue forward.

Reflecting back through time on the smallest of details that helped shape our initial relationship with the deceased and onward through situations that forged our strongest bonds of connection with them can be a suspect process at best. What we remember fondly as being a glorious time of adventure now, may have been a completely disastrous scenario to live through in the moment. What we perceive to be the truth of a situation may have become romanticized over the passage of time into a falsehood or an aberration of the actual events that occurred.

READ MORE:
http://www.typographicalera.com/the-p...

[Madhuri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Planets is a story ringing with a deep sense of personal loss. The narrator wanders around the streets of his city, missing his friend, looking for and finding memories and connections in different corners. Sometimes the thoughts become very repetitive, but mostly they seem full of melancholy. To be cheated of a friend at an age where life revolves around friendship seems like the most disorienting trauma - the narrator seems to have defined his life around this trauma and disorientation.
I loved the stories hidden in the reminiscence, that of exchanged friends who lose their identity, or of the two who keep walking and find a girl, or of the rapist who waits hopelessly for his victim. Each of the stories were both weird and very evocative, some of them keep coming to me in reflective moments.
Look forward to reading My two worlds now.

[Editorial Alfaguara]

Un hombre decide evocar a su amigo de infancia y juventud, desaparecido durante la �ltima dictadura militar argentina. El escenario es Buenos Aires y sus anillos urbanos. El recuerdo convoca las experiencias, los climas y el conjunto de circunstancias que pueblan una amistad juvenil. La novela propone un juego de identidades y de tiempos en el que la �nica certeza est� dada por la falta definitiva del amigo ausente. Para ello se vale de an�cdotas entre simples y fant�sticas que rescatan el aliento trascendental de las historias jas�dicas, donde todo lo vivo parece irreal. Indagaci�n sobre el pasado y relato sobre los recuerdos, Los planetas fue recibido como uno de los acercamientos literarios m�s l�cidos al tema de los desaparecidos. Una verdadera interrogaci�n sobre el significado de la memoria desde la condici�n jud�a.

[Mythili · Rating 3 out of 5]

“A sense of loyalty to his memory leads me to write,” the narrator of Sergio Chejfec’s novel The Planets confesses, thinking back on the life of his dearest friend. Of the duo, M was the story-teller, the writer-to-be, the absent-minded-professor (“always distracted to the point of appearing indifferent”) with a parable in every pocket, viewing the world askance. M was larger-than-life—until he was gone.

http://wordswithoutborders.org/book-r...

[Courtney · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this book as part of the goodreads First Reads program. This was a tender book about a close friendship cut tragically short. The book is a series of memories-some mundane, some thought provokind, some bizarre. It was a bit too cerebral for me. I often felt like the narrative was bogged down by philosophical musings on time, space and identity.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

A novel of remembrance of a friend abducted during the Argentine upheavals of the 1970s; of remembrance, friendship, life, hope, coincidence. Its consistently understated tone reminded me of William Maxwell.

[Indie Book Reviews · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a beautiful story. Some was hard to read, I think it was because it was originally written in Spanish, but I loved the story nonetheless.

I won this book on Goodreads First Reads.

[Vuk Trifkovic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good, but perhaps overly abstract and it feels a bit too "Argentina"...

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing, grief-stricken novel. Just read it!

[Wan Nor · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit too abstract. Not Chejfec at his best. Hopefully The Dark will be a better novel.