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The No Variations: Diary of an Unfinished Novel
A dizzying look at the backrooms of literature, with petty squabbles, long-nurtured grudges, envied or undeserved prizes, failing publishers, and self-important critics, "The No Variations" is a serious game, or perhaps a frivolous tragedy.
- GenresFiction
240 pages, Paperback
First published July 10, 2012
About the author
Luis Chitarroni
34 books13 followersLuis Chitarrroni (Buenos Aires, 1958) es escritor, crítico y editor. Publicó los libros: Siluetas (un catálogo biográfico de escritores reales e imaginarios, que había escrito para la revista Babel), las novelas El carapálida (Tusquets, 1997) y Peripecias del no. Diario de una novela inconclusa (Interzona, 2007), además del libro de ensayos Mil tazas de té (La bestia equilátera,2008). Suele colaborar con diversos medios.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 15, 2014
Is this the future of the novel? (NO.) Is the future of the novel scraps, notes, remarks, aides-mémoire, seemingly connexionless musings, and sections from the various plotlines that might have emerged had the novel been written? (NO.) Are you sure? (NO.) I have a deep interest in this sort of thing. (NO YOU DON’T). In the what-might-have-beens, in allowing each idea to flourish alongside the others culled for personal or commercial reasons. Why can’t art be made from scaffolding? In an age when it is impossible to sit down and plod out yet another novel with yet more fictional people doing fictional versions of distorted real-life events, why bother with the business of stitching things together like an incompetent knitter desperate not to show the joins? This is a brave and important NOvel, an “anti-novel,” if you like (although if we cosify originality with labels, NO one has room to manoeuvre), and far from being a series of unpolished fragments and incoherent scribblings, the fictions that run throughout are dense, allusive, playful and one large self-generating Wikipedia (without the idiotic reader edits and sinister CEOs beg-threatening to monetise the world’s worst encyclopaedia). A work that can be combed and re-combed and still never take “shape,” The No Variations dares you to find coherence, to fumble towards that desire for a traditional NOvel that you covet, and laugh in your face when you fail to insert your bromides in the right orifices. Take NOte.
June 29, 2013
From my review for
The Times Literary Supplement
:
As its subtitle, Diary of an Unfinished Novel, suggests, The No Variations by Luis Chitarroni is not a novel in any traditional sense. Instead, it is the promise of a novel, notes and plans for a work of fiction which in each iteration is cut short by the author with a definitive “NO” – but the “NO” comes too late, for the reader has already experienced the rejected scenario, and thus joins the author in the complex realm of the artistic act. Consumers of art are usually spared the terrifying idea plaguing the artist: that for every creative decision taken, there are infinite, equally valid choices that could have been made instead...
Chitarroni conjures the artist’s world as a Fulknerian place where the past is never dead, and the endless options of creativity are both burden and gift. Sometimes the notational means by which this is presented reduces expression beyond anything the reader can necessarily hope to interpret. A set of words or names might serve an author as aide-memoire, but only the most dedicated reader will spare the time needed to investigate and expand a passage such as “Paul Vérlaine / Lugones “El Solterón” / Swineburne, / Betjeman, / George Herbert / Ater Umbrius, De Quincy // Faulkner, The Bible, Aeschylus (Alter)—book of David, Christopher Smart”. Chitarroni perhaps expects readers will forge their own connections, but there is a danger they will simply skim the list and move on in anticipation of the “NO” to come.
As its subtitle, Diary of an Unfinished Novel, suggests, The No Variations by Luis Chitarroni is not a novel in any traditional sense. Instead, it is the promise of a novel, notes and plans for a work of fiction which in each iteration is cut short by the author with a definitive “NO” – but the “NO” comes too late, for the reader has already experienced the rejected scenario, and thus joins the author in the complex realm of the artistic act. Consumers of art are usually spared the terrifying idea plaguing the artist: that for every creative decision taken, there are infinite, equally valid choices that could have been made instead...
Chitarroni conjures the artist’s world as a Fulknerian place where the past is never dead, and the endless options of creativity are both burden and gift. Sometimes the notational means by which this is presented reduces expression beyond anything the reader can necessarily hope to interpret. A set of words or names might serve an author as aide-memoire, but only the most dedicated reader will spare the time needed to investigate and expand a passage such as “Paul Vérlaine / Lugones “El Solterón” / Swineburne, / Betjeman, / George Herbert / Ater Umbrius, De Quincy // Faulkner, The Bible, Aeschylus (Alter)—book of David, Christopher Smart”. Chitarroni perhaps expects readers will forge their own connections, but there is a danger they will simply skim the list and move on in anticipation of the “NO” to come.
February 26, 2022
Sobre la lectura:
«Que con tanta admiración leí en el cruce de la adolescencia. Se parece ya, lo siento. No se puede escapar de lo que nos ha influido en edad temprana, trato de justificar. Y: no se puede negar el peso que ejerció en el momento crucial —el cruce de la infancia a la juventud— la lectura. La lectura a secas. Peso filatélico de la devoción temprana. Y algo peor, que quede en lo que se escribe lo más embarrado y confuso de ese sistema confesional de alarde: una especie de sordina de la vida, una expulsión vergonzante de los errores acumulados como experiencia. Sabiduría fundamental, inextinguible y encabalgada de Lope: Que otras veces amé / negar no puedo».
«Que con tanta admiración leí en el cruce de la adolescencia. Se parece ya, lo siento. No se puede escapar de lo que nos ha influido en edad temprana, trato de justificar. Y: no se puede negar el peso que ejerció en el momento crucial —el cruce de la infancia a la juventud— la lectura. La lectura a secas. Peso filatélico de la devoción temprana. Y algo peor, que quede en lo que se escribe lo más embarrado y confuso de ese sistema confesional de alarde: una especie de sordina de la vida, una expulsión vergonzante de los errores acumulados como experiencia. Sabiduría fundamental, inextinguible y encabalgada de Lope: Que otras veces amé / negar no puedo».
January 30, 2025
¿La novela lo aguanta todo? Sí, pero no sé si así.
September 17, 2013
The No Variations (originally published in Spanish in 2007), is described in Darren Koolman's Translator's Preface as "an omnium gatherum of obscure references, cryptic anagrams, parenthetical remarks, indecipherable aide-mémoire, overblown critical extracts, imperfectly-wrought poems, bewildering drafts of unfinished stories, characters with unpronounceable names...everything, in other words, a reader might expect to find in the diary of an impenetrably difficult unfinished novel, the result being a book that seems to resist all acts of interpretation" (VI). I think the key words in there, for me, are "bewildering" and "impenetrably difficult."
This book was a slog for me: I struggled to find a way to approach it, to follow it. It's not particularly linear or narrative; plots are introduced and cut off by the NO of the title. It's not character-driven, either: there are plenty of names, but I didn't really get a sense of any of the characters as distinct people: they're all contributors to a fictional literary journal that's big on plagiarism and pseudonyms, but we don't learn much more than that. There are some brief early character sketches (in which we learn, for example, that one character "is short and stocky" and "writes in longhand" and that another "affects elegance to conceal indigence") and there's a list, later, of which characters like which alcoholic beverages ("Red without question. And lots of it" for one; "Fernet or Negroni" for another), and I could maybe tell you which pairs of characters were lovers or spouses, but I don't have a sense that I'm meant to understand any of these characters as people (4-5, 41). A lot of the book is concerned with writing and style, and sometimes this leads to humor: there's mention of a book "in which there wasn't a word that couldn't have been dispensed with" (11); different versions of the same paragraph appear multiple times at different places in the text; there's a section of the book in the style of Henry James. There's a concern with what gets said: in the Jamesian section there's a bit about the story a writer/narrator originally wanted to tell vs. the story he now wants to tell vs. the story he is actually telling. There are lists: I particularly like a list titled, in part, "List of places in London I should have seen during my first visit and their order" (185) and another list of "Ceremonies/Liturgies" that includes such items as "On Elena's way of cutting the uncut pages of a book" (189). Overall, though, I am definitely not this book's ideal reader, and ended up feeling fairly overwhelmed by it.
This book was a slog for me: I struggled to find a way to approach it, to follow it. It's not particularly linear or narrative; plots are introduced and cut off by the NO of the title. It's not character-driven, either: there are plenty of names, but I didn't really get a sense of any of the characters as distinct people: they're all contributors to a fictional literary journal that's big on plagiarism and pseudonyms, but we don't learn much more than that. There are some brief early character sketches (in which we learn, for example, that one character "is short and stocky" and "writes in longhand" and that another "affects elegance to conceal indigence") and there's a list, later, of which characters like which alcoholic beverages ("Red without question. And lots of it" for one; "Fernet or Negroni" for another), and I could maybe tell you which pairs of characters were lovers or spouses, but I don't have a sense that I'm meant to understand any of these characters as people (4-5, 41). A lot of the book is concerned with writing and style, and sometimes this leads to humor: there's mention of a book "in which there wasn't a word that couldn't have been dispensed with" (11); different versions of the same paragraph appear multiple times at different places in the text; there's a section of the book in the style of Henry James. There's a concern with what gets said: in the Jamesian section there's a bit about the story a writer/narrator originally wanted to tell vs. the story he now wants to tell vs. the story he is actually telling. There are lists: I particularly like a list titled, in part, "List of places in London I should have seen during my first visit and their order" (185) and another list of "Ceremonies/Liturgies" that includes such items as "On Elena's way of cutting the uncut pages of a book" (189). Overall, though, I am definitely not this book's ideal reader, and ended up feeling fairly overwhelmed by it.
Want to Read
October 10, 2014Peripecias del no: Diario de una novela inconclusa
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews