Quicksand

by Robert Ashley

Fiction. "QUICKSAND was written to be an opera libretto. But it was written in the form of a novel....I am devoted to "mystery" stories. I read them one after another, mostly two or three times. Some of the best writers today are writing in this form. So, I thought that I would try to make an opera libretto from a mystery story, told verbatim. That is, the libretto and the novel would be the same: no scenes moved around or actions adapted to the proportions of a libretto, just tell the story the way it's told in the novel. But first I needed a novel....So that meant I had to write a mystery novel. Where do you start? The answer is: I always need a 'location' to be inspired to tell a story. Everything in the novel is true, except for a lot of the facts."--Robert Ashley

152 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2011

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Ashley's primary gig is as an opera composer. Not operas like you would see at the Met, like Turandot or Don Giovanni. Ashley's operas consist mainly of rambling monologues, mostly intoned by Ashley himself with his dry Michigan accent, over atmospheric music. It might sound ridiculous but it actually works very well. His most famous opera, Perfect Lives, is the story of a very avante garde bank heist, but the text is only peripherally related to the story. Instead, it's as if Ashley taps into some subterranean river of words that courses somewhere deep in the unconscious mind and siphons up thoughts and associations and insights that only see the conscious light of day when we're on the verge of sleep. It's not that the story isn't important, it's more like the text exists under the story, and we're following the story from inside the characters' unconscious minds. It's part poetry, part theater, and part spiritual tract.

Quicksand is Ashley's attempt at a straightforward novel. An obsessive fan of mystery novels, he decided to make his first novel a mystery. What he ended up with is more of a cool-headed political thriller that, despite having the rough contours of a thriller, has none of the conventional tension of the genre. The unnamed protagonist, who bears a strong resemblance to Ashley, is a secret agent for the US government, and during an overseas assignment, in an unnamed nation resembling Burma, he gets sucked into a coup plot. I don't think I'm spoiling anything to say that the coup goes down without a hitch, and the protagonist at the end of the novel is barely any different than he was at the beginning. He encounters no serious obstacles along the way. There really is no drama to the plot.

This seems to be entirely intentional. In his forward to the novel, Ashley has this to say about "plot":

A few critics have remarked that my operas have no plot. That’s not entirely true, but I wasn’t surprised. Many contemporary operas have no plot, because our idea of what a plot means has changed a lot since the Italian composers of the nineteenth century used plot to express political ideas. So, the no-plot criticism is valid—though perhaps not particularly important. Almost all of my operas were composed without any thought of the need for a linear plot.

Contemporary opera—my work in particular, but, that of a lot of other composers, too—is usually a gathering of characters with stories to tell. The why-the-characters-are-together has replaced the notion of plot.

Instead of plot, voice is the main attraction. I'm pretty sure that a good deal of my enjoyment of this novel came from hearing Ashley's voice in my head as I was reading it. His voice is airy, very high in the throat and somewhat scratchy, very laid back. Here's a link to the iconic opening scene of Perfect Lives, which will give you a taste of Ashley's style:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Tt4a8...

So, the novel--it's an odd mix of high-stakes thriller and Robert Ashley opera. I loved it, but maybe it's an acquired taste.

[Gala · Rating 4 out of 5]

Esta novela surge de un desafío, dice la contratapa que escribieron en Blatt y Ríos. A Ashley le decían que sus óperas no tenían argumento y fue y escribió algo dentro del género en el que parece que lo que más importa es el argumento. Pero a mí me pasó que leí todo el libro buscando la intervenciones del narrador sobre el argumento, más que el argumento en sí. Es más, el argumento me importó casi nada. Ni me lo acuerdo en realidad. Cuando digo intervenciones me refiero a cosas como estas:

"para volver un poco para atrás y cambiar de tema, debería haber dicho que cuando Pooh vino a mi habitación después de que llegamos al aeropuerto y nos hacíamos los que hablábamos de cosas sin importancia, me terminé de enterar de que lee novelas policiales norteamericanas", o

"Acá me debería tomar un descanso. Este relato me está agotando. Ya estoy casi de vuelta en la parte en la que estoy en el baño en calzoncillo y remera apoyado contra el lavatorio. Los tiempos del relato me tienen un poco confundido".

¿En qué novela policial (las que lee Robert Ashley) se juega así con el tiempo? En esta nomás. No en las novelas que lee, es en la novela que escribió. El narrador va y viene, dice que tendría que haber dicho otra cosa, a veces se adelanta a las cosas que van a pasar; es una novela policial que lo único que mantiene del género es el argumento, pero todo lo demás es nuevo, o por lo menos diferente.

[Julio César · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una novela policial escrita por un compositor de ópera contemporáneo, pensada como un libreto de ópera. La prosa tiene una cadencia extraña, a lo que se suma la traducción -de un tal Aldo Giacometti- en español porteñizado.
No atraerá a los fanáticos del género, por su amateurismo, ni a los adeptos a la ópera, por su cualidad de boceto. Es una curiosidad de la historia.

[Michael Dipietro · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is really only for Robert Ashley fans. Quicksand is the libretto for an opera he wrote in the 2000s in espionage novel form, which I saw staged in NYC in 2015 (I think?) and loved. His sense of humor really shines through in the writing.

[Evan Pincus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ashley once posited that "the experience of hearing an opera is that you accumulate a lot of details that are not very significant in themselves. No one of the details in an opera (or in a novel) is a mind-boggling detail. But things just keep coming until you have a huge pile of them. That’s when they start meaning something." Reading his novel, which, in typical Ashley fashion, is naturally also an opera, it was hard not to keep this in mind - although it's really more of a spy novel, he describes it repeatedly as a mystery novel, and the generic form creates certain expectations of what details might ultimately pile up to begin meaning something. Quicksand offers none of that, and instead the details that pile up are what one might expect from an Ashley opera - quotidian observations, granular and repetitive processes, reactions, etcetera. Minor late-style work, but good for fanatics and like any good pulp paperback you can knock it out in an afternoon!

[mery :) · Rating 3 out of 5]

buena trama (ponele q tmb buen giro de trama), te mantiene entretenida desde el principio, aunque debo decir q en lo personal un poco me decepcionó. me esperaba otra cosa, otro final… anywaayy no me pareció un mal libro, le pongo 3 estrellitas