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Perú
Hacia 1940 un niño de seis años mata a otro chico de la misma edad mientras juegan en la mejor casa del barrio, la de Andy Lieblich, el tercer niño de esta perturbadora historia de la que también forman parte una niñera, un chofer negro y algunos fascinantes personajes más, retratados siempre a través de la voz del propio narrador y protagonista, que ya adulto y padre de un hijo evocará aquella oscura historia de su infancia mientras ve en la televisión los sangrientos sucesos acaecidos en una cárcel de Perú.
«Un gran paso adelante. Perú es una hazaña… Aquí está el primer Lish, con una voz como ningún otro.» Harold Bloom
«Una novela hipnótica cuya potencia va en aumento: dibujada con una maestría que te atrapa.» Don DeLillo
«Espectacular… Evoca con una inquietante viveza los sentimientos más oscuros de la infancia… Cautivadora, perturbadora, totalmente original.» Anne Tyler
«Un libro increíble, obsesivo y fascinante.» (The New York Times)
«Una de las novelas más tortuosas e impresionantes que he leído.» (The Washington Post)
«Un gran paso adelante. Perú es una hazaña… Aquí está el primer Lish, con una voz como ningún otro.» Harold Bloom
«Una novela hipnótica cuya potencia va en aumento: dibujada con una maestría que te atrapa.» Don DeLillo
«Espectacular… Evoca con una inquietante viveza los sentimientos más oscuros de la infancia… Cautivadora, perturbadora, totalmente original.» Anne Tyler
«Un libro increíble, obsesivo y fascinante.» (The New York Times)
«Una de las novelas más tortuosas e impresionantes que he leído.» (The Washington Post)
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
6 people are currently reading
610 people want to read
About the author
Gordon Lish
50 books77 followersGordon Jay Lish is an American writer. As a literary editor, he championed many American authors, particularly Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, and Richard Ford.
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October 11, 2020
Give me a novel of obsession. "I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man."
Peru by Gordon Lish is a novel of obsession, a novel where an American middle-aged underground man spins his internal dialogue with a vengeance, an intense gush, a sorcerer's hex.
One big reason Peru makes for a unique, unforgettable read: Gordon Lish's narrator can enter the mind and body of his six-year-old self - a six year old's feelings, confusions, fears, ambitions, a six year old's wish for power and control, a six year old's vivid, immediate sense of shimmering aliveness.
Gordon Lish frames his tale thusly: While packing up his son for camp, the fifty-year-old narrator watches a snatch of extreme violence on the late night news: two men repeatedly stab each other as they're both machine-gunned down by police - location: a prison roof in Peru (thus the novel's title). The following morning, in his haste to get his son off on a bus, a taxi's trunk lid accidentally comes down on the poor guy's head.
Eyeballing the prison hyperviolence (only visual since the narrator and his wife had the sound turned down so as not to wake up their son) combined with that crack on his head trigger the narrator's memory - he flashes back forty-four years to the time when he, Gordon, was a six-year-old boy.
Gordon merges with his six-year-old self and quickly relates what's critically important: playing in Andy Lieblich's sandbox (his family lived next door to the Lieblichs), memories of Andy, Andy's nanny, a colored man (author's language) employed by the Lieblichs, his first-grade teacher Miss Donnelly and, last but hardly least, the fact he, Gordon, killed a boy his age, Stephen Adinoff, whacked him on the head with a toy hoe in Andy Lieblich's sandbox.
Quick shift to key themes and highlights:
MEMORY
As a symphony orchestra circles back, repeating musical phrases at a faster and faster tempo, so too Gordon circles back to the people and events surrounding his time in the sandbox, a constant acceleration, picking up more detail with each pass, a further elaboration of what he hears, feels and smells, his wishes and desires, so that toward the end of the novel, Gordon's memory spins in a frantic swirl.
LANGUAGE
In his essay, A Sentence is a Lonely Place, Gary Lutz makes a profound observation about language: "Only on the page is it flat and undensified. In the mouth and in the mind it is three-dimensional, and there are parts that shoot out from it or sink into its syntactic surround." This is key when reading Peru. To get the full impact, the magical buzz of what it means to be Gordon the six year old, open yourself up completely, submit to the rhythm and repetition of his words, even read sections of the novel aloud.
OPENING OF THE HEART
Gordon Lish on writing: "You're safest when you're at your most honest - which I would be quick to justify my own scribbling as being. In my writing, I'm psychopathically engaged with the phonemic; the smallest spicule of the construct is a concern to me. At the same time, I try to give way to a speech which has its origin somewhere well beyond my understanding. It is as if something interior is determined to speak." And Gordon told another interviewer: "I'm trying to recover the language as it occurs in my heart, in my ear."
I include the above quotes to underscore why Peru packs such a wallop: to repeat, Gordon Lish connects directly with the heart and mind of a six year old. It's no accident that many readers of the novel have reported Peru awakens their own memories of what it was like to be a kid that age.
FACT OR FICTION
Did Gordon actually kill Steven Adinoff? Or, is this a story made up by Gordon the six-year-old kid and/or Gordon the fifty-year-old man? The answer might not be clear cut for even Gordon himself since memory can slip, slither, skid and slide. Recall Jorge Luis Borges recounting how when we recall a past memory the first time we have the image of the past before us but when we recall subsequent times, we are recalling a memory of a memory. Imagine Gordon recounting episodes in the sandbox hundreds or even thousands of times over the years. And since we're storytelling animals at heart, when do the facts, so called, stop and our stories, our fictions begin? Seen in this way, Peru can be seen as a meditation on the nature of memory and identity.
POWER PLAY
Gordon confesses, "We just had the strength of children. We were not strong - believe you me, we really weren't. As boys in general go, or as they went in those particular times, or in that town at that particular time, that is, in the town of Woodmere, we were not what you would have called the sturdy kind of boy or the rough-and-ready kind of boy, the boy who is by nature husky in the body and hardy in the habits. You did not get muscles from the kinds of things which boys like us did, or just have them from the type of bodies which we were born with to begin with. We ourselves were not boys like that."
How would Gordon go about compensating for what he judges a lack of strength? What if he, Gordon, could kill, kill a kid he judged inferior since he spoke with a speech impediment? Recall Raskolnikov, recall Alex and his Droogs - violence and hyperviolence as the ultimate power play, made all the more powerful when linked with obsession.
All told, Peru makes for one hell of a powerful, penetrating novel.
Gordon Lish, born 1934
August 11, 2013
I never wanted to be the one who I am.
A man cannot go to sleep. He has seen something on television. She says he will have to wait until morning when someone else will be there. Six hours. There were men on a rooftop and they are fighting to the death, living to the death. They are the prisoners or did they become the guards. He didn't understand until now what it was when he was six years old and he murdered the other boy in the sandbox. He couldn't see his own face. What was that on the television as if it was seen from a million miles away, as if it was glimpsed from the past or the future and of outer space. It is a prison in Peru. Like meets like. Faces rhyme, the meanings meet up as if they were halves of a heart-shaped albatross. The ringing ends of life ending sentences. He sits in the sandbox and everything that is everything rhymes. He is God in his little boy body making time stop.
He wants to be the delicate Andy Lieblich. Andy has to take naps, the center for a Mommy and a Daddy, the object for the paid Nanny to swoop over, to hold the keys to the sandbox over all the boys of the neighborhood. He could tell you where the best sand was in that sandbox. Andy always smelled of cocoa butter and precious skin. The Nanny is the blight of the sun in her pulled from the atmosphere of make that face and it will stay that way. She must be hard of cliches and proverbs underneath her clothing. He would have loved to live in them and feeds on when he could have been under her eye as much as Andy Lieblich. Someone says that he is something. He could almost taste what it would have been like. Maybe today will be the day when he is chosen for the sandbox.
I remember being conscious of my new supposed place when visiting wealthier other children. They didn't wear charity hand-me-downs (One year I wore a Florida Gators sweatshirt of a murder victim). I wasn't invited over again after the reciprocal trips to my home didn't yield any good snacks. I associated wealth with crap like capri sun drinks and the "fun packs" of cereals or chips. I would turn down offers of treats when visiting in fear of the later issue. The visit would finish in acute longing for something to drink. Peru sources these hot places of in your own skin and meets them with his future. He's a man in his fifties and he would long to borrow the umbrella of the place Andy Lieblich had. He could tell you everything. He couldn't tell you what it looked like after they were forced to move away. What did his parents really think about their son who murdered six-year-old Steven Adinoff with a sandbox shovel? He could tell you how he was the colored man hired to work on the Lieblich's car. He could see the insides of him if he were a dolphin with dolphin sonar to see more than Superman ever could. Hearts being and blood and guts and what would that colored man see as the little boys were playing in the sandbox. I don't believe he thought anything of the little boys, or that the Nanny would watch the boy she wasn't paid to watch. To me her greeting card catch phrases bespeak of possessing no mind of her own. To the boy and the man it is a safety net of I know what others are thinking and I know my place. He would look like he was smiling like a dolphin looks like they are smiling to a human in the front row of a theme park exhibition. The little boy's mother is secretly glad that he killed her is his dolphin's projected face rhyme. The boy's head is a soft fruit and pitted. The heads on the tv in the far away land of Peru are the same and they were born that way. The rooftops of mayhem and belief.
The corduroys of the boy on his way to school speak to him. Move this way and they speak a comforting rhythm. He's not alone when the music he can make on his own carry him. It is lonely in the summer time without this company. This description made me breathe harder. I don't see what he knows and yet I could smell the cocoa butter as a memory. The citronella protection the Lieblich boy got from his Nanny. The place on the sidewalk waiting to be chosen for his day in the sun. I don't understand that it was meant to happen. I see where he is in the garage feeling wrong. He stays feeling wrong. The top secret government sonar shows insides of not for him and it made me so sad that his answer remained the inane sayings of that Nanny. He wanted to be Andy Lieblich because someone else showed that he mattered. I have nothing for what could have made that any better because I can't will it into the back of the black man fixing the car in front of them as they play in the sandbox. I can't make him just know that you gotta say "Fuck 'em" and not know your "place" with people who have more than you do (or just seem to have more than you do).
From what I've read about Peru and Lish it appears he's compared to Thomas Bernhard and Samuel Beckett a fair bit. I have to say that this is pretty right on in the repetition as feeling out reality. I want it to be true. Please don't let it be true. Make time stop and find it again in fate. I love about all three authors the philosophy as living practice. It is a to carry on breathing and moving thing, really. The obsessional quality of the Peru narrator (I also see that he's taken to be a Gordon Lish character himself. It has been some weeks now and I honestly don't remember any time he's named as Gordon. I've been ill, though, and so extra flaky) intrigued me in the shark swimming of like meets like. That kind of rhyme in his life occurrences got me. If his head was cut off when he remained under the thumb of his place he still swings on the skin. I'm impressed with this as who they are unconsciously, a can't stop touching the void in your mouth reaction of information. To understand what he understands when he sees those men fighting in the Peruvian prison. It is to be him and make time stop in all that he sees.
A man cannot go to sleep. He has seen something on television. She says he will have to wait until morning when someone else will be there. Six hours. There were men on a rooftop and they are fighting to the death, living to the death. They are the prisoners or did they become the guards. He didn't understand until now what it was when he was six years old and he murdered the other boy in the sandbox. He couldn't see his own face. What was that on the television as if it was seen from a million miles away, as if it was glimpsed from the past or the future and of outer space. It is a prison in Peru. Like meets like. Faces rhyme, the meanings meet up as if they were halves of a heart-shaped albatross. The ringing ends of life ending sentences. He sits in the sandbox and everything that is everything rhymes. He is God in his little boy body making time stop.
I'll tell you one of the worst things in my life. This is one of the worst things in my life- a day when the nanny said that I couldn't come over and play but one when she went ahead and changed her mind later on and said that I could actually do it- and then it started raining just a little bit after she'd said it, like just instants after she had given me her blessing- and then for the whole rest of the day, all the rest of that day after Andy Lieblich went in and the nanny went in with him, I sat down inside of our garage and kept feeling funny and out of the ordinary, like as if I was in some kind of trouble and that certain things which I did not exactly know about yet were probably dangerously unfinished, lying lopsided somewhere and being dangerous, and it made me feel a terrible wildness, this strange feeling, it made me feel like as if I had to feel the wildness if I was ever going to get rid of the strange feeling, which I think, to my way of thinking as a child, was the worse one, the feeling before the feeling of wildness, the feeling of incompletion and of chaos, a feeling of things getting started and of never getting them over with, of parts of them being impossible for you to ever get them totally taken care of yourself.
He wants to be the delicate Andy Lieblich. Andy has to take naps, the center for a Mommy and a Daddy, the object for the paid Nanny to swoop over, to hold the keys to the sandbox over all the boys of the neighborhood. He could tell you where the best sand was in that sandbox. Andy always smelled of cocoa butter and precious skin. The Nanny is the blight of the sun in her pulled from the atmosphere of make that face and it will stay that way. She must be hard of cliches and proverbs underneath her clothing. He would have loved to live in them and feeds on when he could have been under her eye as much as Andy Lieblich. Someone says that he is something. He could almost taste what it would have been like. Maybe today will be the day when he is chosen for the sandbox.
I remember being conscious of my new supposed place when visiting wealthier other children. They didn't wear charity hand-me-downs (One year I wore a Florida Gators sweatshirt of a murder victim). I wasn't invited over again after the reciprocal trips to my home didn't yield any good snacks. I associated wealth with crap like capri sun drinks and the "fun packs" of cereals or chips. I would turn down offers of treats when visiting in fear of the later issue. The visit would finish in acute longing for something to drink. Peru sources these hot places of in your own skin and meets them with his future. He's a man in his fifties and he would long to borrow the umbrella of the place Andy Lieblich had. He could tell you everything. He couldn't tell you what it looked like after they were forced to move away. What did his parents really think about their son who murdered six-year-old Steven Adinoff with a sandbox shovel? He could tell you how he was the colored man hired to work on the Lieblich's car. He could see the insides of him if he were a dolphin with dolphin sonar to see more than Superman ever could. Hearts being and blood and guts and what would that colored man see as the little boys were playing in the sandbox. I don't believe he thought anything of the little boys, or that the Nanny would watch the boy she wasn't paid to watch. To me her greeting card catch phrases bespeak of possessing no mind of her own. To the boy and the man it is a safety net of I know what others are thinking and I know my place. He would look like he was smiling like a dolphin looks like they are smiling to a human in the front row of a theme park exhibition. The little boy's mother is secretly glad that he killed her is his dolphin's projected face rhyme. The boy's head is a soft fruit and pitted. The heads on the tv in the far away land of Peru are the same and they were born that way. The rooftops of mayhem and belief.
The corduroys of the boy on his way to school speak to him. Move this way and they speak a comforting rhythm. He's not alone when the music he can make on his own carry him. It is lonely in the summer time without this company. This description made me breathe harder. I don't see what he knows and yet I could smell the cocoa butter as a memory. The citronella protection the Lieblich boy got from his Nanny. The place on the sidewalk waiting to be chosen for his day in the sun. I don't understand that it was meant to happen. I see where he is in the garage feeling wrong. He stays feeling wrong. The top secret government sonar shows insides of not for him and it made me so sad that his answer remained the inane sayings of that Nanny. He wanted to be Andy Lieblich because someone else showed that he mattered. I have nothing for what could have made that any better because I can't will it into the back of the black man fixing the car in front of them as they play in the sandbox. I can't make him just know that you gotta say "Fuck 'em" and not know your "place" with people who have more than you do (or just seem to have more than you do).
From what I've read about Peru and Lish it appears he's compared to Thomas Bernhard and Samuel Beckett a fair bit. I have to say that this is pretty right on in the repetition as feeling out reality. I want it to be true. Please don't let it be true. Make time stop and find it again in fate. I love about all three authors the philosophy as living practice. It is a to carry on breathing and moving thing, really. The obsessional quality of the Peru narrator (I also see that he's taken to be a Gordon Lish character himself. It has been some weeks now and I honestly don't remember any time he's named as Gordon. I've been ill, though, and so extra flaky) intrigued me in the shark swimming of like meets like. That kind of rhyme in his life occurrences got me. If his head was cut off when he remained under the thumb of his place he still swings on the skin. I'm impressed with this as who they are unconsciously, a can't stop touching the void in your mouth reaction of information. To understand what he understands when he sees those men fighting in the Peruvian prison. It is to be him and make time stop in all that he sees.
Read
August 15, 2024Some thoughts here: https://youtu.be/shUb3zMTpS4
May 6, 2023
A lot of the review quotes on the cover of this book said how unique it was, the bravery of the writing and the like but not one said how it was as a read. Often with books that are so unique and experimental they are incoherent egotistical puff-pieces that are, to anyone without access to the innermost workings of the author’s brain, unreadable and un-understandable. I would not put this in that category, the narrative is easy(ish) to follow despite the endless repetition of events and leaping around the timeline. Our protagonist is packing for his son’s trip to summer camp when he sees a prison riot in South America being reported on the news. This unexpected flash of violence – seeing the bloodied men on the rooftop – awakens a long dormant memory of himself committing an act of violence as a small child.
The majority of the narrative is him recollecting his life at that time, his parents his home, the feelings of envy for the more affluent lifestyle of his neighbour. Lish writes well on those childhood feelings of jealousy over new friends that infiltrate, the absolute necessity to get the spade rather than the rake to play with in the sand pit (anyone who has taken a child to a public play area or worked in a nursery will be only too familiar with this), the dislike mixed with fear and respect for the adults that instil rules. The issue is that it just goes on a bit too long and the payoff at the end feels like a swizz. The cheat of an author who doesn’t want to define the truth and so leaves an ambiguity that is a literary equivalent of the childhood, ‘he woke up and it was all a dream’.
The majority of the narrative is him recollecting his life at that time, his parents his home, the feelings of envy for the more affluent lifestyle of his neighbour. Lish writes well on those childhood feelings of jealousy over new friends that infiltrate, the absolute necessity to get the spade rather than the rake to play with in the sand pit (anyone who has taken a child to a public play area or worked in a nursery will be only too familiar with this), the dislike mixed with fear and respect for the adults that instil rules. The issue is that it just goes on a bit too long and the payoff at the end feels like a swizz. The cheat of an author who doesn’t want to define the truth and so leaves an ambiguity that is a literary equivalent of the childhood, ‘he woke up and it was all a dream’.
October 8, 2020
https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/pe...
wool· intr.v. wool·gath·ered, wool·gath·er·ing, wool·gath·ers: To engage in fanciful daydreaming.
...Steven Adinoff was just woolgathering and then caught himself at it...
Was the boy who Gordon killed, Steven Adinoff, just dreaming when he got it?
In the very first paragraph Gordon Lish tells us every character he intends on showing us. The boy he killed in the sandbox Steven Adinoff, Gordon's neighbor Andy Lieblich and his nanny, the "colored" man, and Gordon's elementary school teacher Miss Donnelly. From that paragraph on Lish circles these subjects as if he were a raging-mad Comanche, deftly and finally putting his object where all of us can see it squarely in the sandbox. Early on it is known that all three boys, Steven, Andy, and Gordon, were only six years old. The rest of the characters are adults who generally are in charge of keeping children safe and teaching kids to be good playmates and to get along. We get some rather vague idea that the toy rake Steven Adinoff was using had its tines stuck in Gordon's head, which may have had something or other to do with Steven Adinoff ending up dead. The Gordon Lish I personally know is not the Lish who wrote this book or even the character in it. Lish originally wrote this novel in 1986 which numbers out to a good nine years before I met him. But I had been sending him manuscripts since 1987 and reading everything in his oeuvre to date. Much has changed with me and with Gordon since I first read Peru in the original E.P. Dutton version. For both, we have a history now and we are quite a bit older. Then there was a Sceptre edition published in Great Britain in 1987 followed in 1997 by the Four Walls, Eight Windows edition of Peru. Changes were made to all four editions of this book. It has been my personal experience with Gordon that he often changes the text throughout all of his books in the normal course of one of his gracious attempts to inscribe his name on the title page.
The Gordon on the page is in love with Andy Lieblich. He is also obsessed with the entire family. All of them. From the nanny to the "colored" man washing and waxing the Buick. Gordon wanted the life Andy Lieblich had.
...The kind of boy I wanted to be would be a boy who could not keep any fried foods down or miss his nap or not get his bath in a bathtub or even have to get a sandwich off the kitchen counter and not be served his meat pattie when it was high time for lunch or for him to have to have his milk without the chill off...
In real life I see and hear the same Gordon Lish frantic in his telling, then his calming down for a spell, and then reviving enough again to raise the bar yet another level to his sometimes manic excitement. He does this as a grown man on the streets of New York City. Gordon Lish is an amazing performance actor, on the stage or on the page, it does not matter. His words are up and down just as the rake was and then the hoe.
Today, during my daily reading period, I came across a line or two from a Thomas Bernhard novella Walking. It was a timely piece seeing that I would complete my reading of this Dalkey Archive version of Peru shortly thereafter. "...looking in the immediate proximity reveals nothing but incompetence. One should, in every case, go back over everything, says Oehler, even if it is in the depths of the past and scarcely ascertainable and discernible any longer." This is what Gordon Lish means to do. He has mental agility enough to carry this out to the nth degree. I have read a bit of Proust, nothing complete, but there is nobody for me like Lish to make me remember my childhood so vividly. Even the terrible violence that erupts on the page here, the gist of the story is the revisiting amidst immense feelings of one’s childhood and all the nuances we miss in the daily events of our adult lives. Lish, however, can make you feel somewhat icky in his accounting of a childhood murder staged in a sandbox.
There are so many ways of seeing things. First the TV news report opening the novel and then a memory from forty-four years ago. Not to mention the cab later as an adult and getting hurt again enough he has to go to the hospital to have the wound closed. And the cab driver being a "colored" man just as the gardener was while in the employ of the Lieblich family so many years ago. Gordon, the character in the book, wanted to kiss both of these "colored" men.
...Listen to this — I wanted to kiss Kobbe Koffi...
What about the shower and Gordon's hairy dad? Gordon once told me years ago that this book Peru was his one homoerotic novel. I never really got it until now. I wasn't skilled enough back then in paying attention to all the details.
...Knew that that was what I was always thinking when I was lying there in the water soaking, knew that I was always thinking that I am doing this for him, that I am lying here in this bathtub for him to come home to me and find me, that I am waiting for my father to come home to me and come up the stairs to me and come see me and find me — see not his son but me, his lady-in-waiting waiting for him — clean...
The fact is we are all waiting. In Gordon's case he was a lady-in-waiting ready for whatever happens next. Because it will. Things happen and the truth is we like to watch. In this case it is the view taken from being on our backside. And still we seem to be delusional about our very own dying. But the Lish Dalkey Archive introduction to Peru alone is worth the price of admission. Granted, Lish is an acquired taste, but this novel is definitely worth reading for any doubters out there still listening. The emphasis for Lish is always on his choice of words, and the exquisite language that follows is a given when reading any work written by Gordon Lish.
wool· intr.v. wool·gath·ered, wool·gath·er·ing, wool·gath·ers: To engage in fanciful daydreaming.
...Steven Adinoff was just woolgathering and then caught himself at it...
Was the boy who Gordon killed, Steven Adinoff, just dreaming when he got it?
In the very first paragraph Gordon Lish tells us every character he intends on showing us. The boy he killed in the sandbox Steven Adinoff, Gordon's neighbor Andy Lieblich and his nanny, the "colored" man, and Gordon's elementary school teacher Miss Donnelly. From that paragraph on Lish circles these subjects as if he were a raging-mad Comanche, deftly and finally putting his object where all of us can see it squarely in the sandbox. Early on it is known that all three boys, Steven, Andy, and Gordon, were only six years old. The rest of the characters are adults who generally are in charge of keeping children safe and teaching kids to be good playmates and to get along. We get some rather vague idea that the toy rake Steven Adinoff was using had its tines stuck in Gordon's head, which may have had something or other to do with Steven Adinoff ending up dead. The Gordon Lish I personally know is not the Lish who wrote this book or even the character in it. Lish originally wrote this novel in 1986 which numbers out to a good nine years before I met him. But I had been sending him manuscripts since 1987 and reading everything in his oeuvre to date. Much has changed with me and with Gordon since I first read Peru in the original E.P. Dutton version. For both, we have a history now and we are quite a bit older. Then there was a Sceptre edition published in Great Britain in 1987 followed in 1997 by the Four Walls, Eight Windows edition of Peru. Changes were made to all four editions of this book. It has been my personal experience with Gordon that he often changes the text throughout all of his books in the normal course of one of his gracious attempts to inscribe his name on the title page.
The Gordon on the page is in love with Andy Lieblich. He is also obsessed with the entire family. All of them. From the nanny to the "colored" man washing and waxing the Buick. Gordon wanted the life Andy Lieblich had.
...The kind of boy I wanted to be would be a boy who could not keep any fried foods down or miss his nap or not get his bath in a bathtub or even have to get a sandwich off the kitchen counter and not be served his meat pattie when it was high time for lunch or for him to have to have his milk without the chill off...
In real life I see and hear the same Gordon Lish frantic in his telling, then his calming down for a spell, and then reviving enough again to raise the bar yet another level to his sometimes manic excitement. He does this as a grown man on the streets of New York City. Gordon Lish is an amazing performance actor, on the stage or on the page, it does not matter. His words are up and down just as the rake was and then the hoe.
Today, during my daily reading period, I came across a line or two from a Thomas Bernhard novella Walking. It was a timely piece seeing that I would complete my reading of this Dalkey Archive version of Peru shortly thereafter. "...looking in the immediate proximity reveals nothing but incompetence. One should, in every case, go back over everything, says Oehler, even if it is in the depths of the past and scarcely ascertainable and discernible any longer." This is what Gordon Lish means to do. He has mental agility enough to carry this out to the nth degree. I have read a bit of Proust, nothing complete, but there is nobody for me like Lish to make me remember my childhood so vividly. Even the terrible violence that erupts on the page here, the gist of the story is the revisiting amidst immense feelings of one’s childhood and all the nuances we miss in the daily events of our adult lives. Lish, however, can make you feel somewhat icky in his accounting of a childhood murder staged in a sandbox.
There are so many ways of seeing things. First the TV news report opening the novel and then a memory from forty-four years ago. Not to mention the cab later as an adult and getting hurt again enough he has to go to the hospital to have the wound closed. And the cab driver being a "colored" man just as the gardener was while in the employ of the Lieblich family so many years ago. Gordon, the character in the book, wanted to kiss both of these "colored" men.
...Listen to this — I wanted to kiss Kobbe Koffi...
What about the shower and Gordon's hairy dad? Gordon once told me years ago that this book Peru was his one homoerotic novel. I never really got it until now. I wasn't skilled enough back then in paying attention to all the details.
...Knew that that was what I was always thinking when I was lying there in the water soaking, knew that I was always thinking that I am doing this for him, that I am lying here in this bathtub for him to come home to me and find me, that I am waiting for my father to come home to me and come up the stairs to me and come see me and find me — see not his son but me, his lady-in-waiting waiting for him — clean...
The fact is we are all waiting. In Gordon's case he was a lady-in-waiting ready for whatever happens next. Because it will. Things happen and the truth is we like to watch. In this case it is the view taken from being on our backside. And still we seem to be delusional about our very own dying. But the Lish Dalkey Archive introduction to Peru alone is worth the price of admission. Granted, Lish is an acquired taste, but this novel is definitely worth reading for any doubters out there still listening. The emphasis for Lish is always on his choice of words, and the exquisite language that follows is a given when reading any work written by Gordon Lish.
October 19, 2023
Lish writes like a man shitting violently after one too many cups of coffee.
November 23, 2009
From an author with such an eminent reputation and who was such an influential editor, Lish's Peru is a flimsy, shallow book.
A rambling kind of monologue, Peru is told as a fifty-year-old man's recollection of his murder of a child that he committed as a child. Other than that sensationalism of one six-year-old killing another, there is nothing else here except for a half-hearted attempt at style.
If nothing else, this novel shows that not everyone who can edit can write. One can see here why Lish so brutally edited Raymond Carver's work, to the point where today's more cynical reader attributes authorship of some of Carver's better-known stories to the editor: Gordon Lish was a writer with nothing to say. He could take what someone else had to say, and with hacks and slashes, attempt to make it his own.
A rambling kind of monologue, Peru is told as a fifty-year-old man's recollection of his murder of a child that he committed as a child. Other than that sensationalism of one six-year-old killing another, there is nothing else here except for a half-hearted attempt at style.
If nothing else, this novel shows that not everyone who can edit can write. One can see here why Lish so brutally edited Raymond Carver's work, to the point where today's more cynical reader attributes authorship of some of Carver's better-known stories to the editor: Gordon Lish was a writer with nothing to say. He could take what someone else had to say, and with hacks and slashes, attempt to make it his own.
May 3, 2009
Super good and menacing (like Dear Mr. Capote) but this one has a weird coming of age kind of slant as well.
October 8, 2020
https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/pe...
wool· intr.v. wool·gath·ered, wool·gath·er·ing, wool·gath·ers: To engage in fanciful daydreaming.
...Steven Adinoff was just woolgathering and then caught himself at it...
Was the boy who Gordon killed, Steven Adinoff, just dreaming when he got it?
In the very first paragraph Gordon Lish tells us every character he intends on showing us. The boy he killed in the sandbox Steven Adinoff, Gordon's neighbor Andy Lieblich and his nanny, the "colored" man, and Gordon's elementary school teacher Miss Donnelly. From that paragraph on Lish circles these subjects as if he were a raging-mad Comanche, deftly and finally putting his object where all of us can see it squarely in the sandbox. Early on it is known that all three boys, Steven, Andy, and Gordon, were only six years old. The rest of the characters are adults who generally are in charge of keeping children safe and teaching kids to be good playmates and to get along. We get some rather vague idea that the toy rake Steven Adinoff was using had its tines stuck in Gordon's head, which may have had something or other to do with Steven Adinoff ending up dead. The Gordon Lish I personally know is not the Lish who wrote this book or even the character in it. Lish originally wrote this novel in 1986 which numbers out to a good nine years before I met him. But I had been sending him manuscripts since 1987 and reading everything in his oeuvre to date. Much has changed with me and with Gordon since I first read Peru in the original E.P. Dutton version. For both, we have a history now and we are quite a bit older. Then there was a Sceptre edition published in Great Britain in 1987 followed in 1997 by the Four Walls, Eight Windows edition of Peru. Changes were made to all four editions of this book. It has been my personal experience with Gordon that he often changes the text throughout all of his books in the normal course of one of his gracious attempts to inscribe his name on the title page.
The Gordon on the page is in love with Andy Lieblich. He is also obsessed with the entire family. All of them. From the nanny to the "colored" man washing and waxing the Buick. Gordon wanted the life Andy Lieblich had.
...The kind of boy I wanted to be would be a boy who could not keep any fried foods down or miss his nap or not get his bath in a bathtub or even have to get a sandwich off the kitchen counter and not be served his meat pattie when it was high time for lunch or for him to have to have his milk without the chill off...
In real life I see and hear the same Gordon Lish frantic in his telling, then his calming down for a spell, and then reviving enough again to raise the bar yet another level to his sometimes manic excitement. He does this as a grown man on the streets of New York City. Gordon Lish is an amazing performance actor, on the stage or on the page, it does not matter. His words are up and down just as the rake was and then the hoe.
Today, during my daily reading period, I came across a line or two from a Thomas Bernhard novella Walking. It was a timely piece seeing that I would complete my reading of this Dalkey Archive version of Peru shortly thereafter. "...looking in the immediate proximity reveals nothing but incompetence. One should, in every case, go back over everything, says Oehler, even if it is in the depths of the past and scarcely ascertainable and discernible any longer." This is what Gordon Lish means to do. He has mental agility enough to carry this out to the nth degree. I have read a bit of Proust, nothing complete, but there is nobody for me like Lish to make me remember my childhood so vividly. Even the terrible violence that erupts on the page here, the gist of the story is the revisiting amidst immense feelings of one’s childhood and all the nuances we miss in the daily events of our adult lives. Lish, however, can make you feel somewhat icky in his accounting of a childhood murder staged in a sandbox.
There are so many ways of seeing things. First the TV news report opening the novel and then a memory from forty-four years ago. Not to mention the cab later as an adult and getting hurt again enough he has to go to the hospital to have the wound closed. And the cab driver being a "colored" man just as the gardener was while in the employ of the Lieblich family so many years ago. Gordon, the character in the book, wanted to kiss both of these "colored" men.
...Listen to this — I wanted to kiss Kobbe Koffi...
What about the shower and Gordon's hairy dad? Gordon once told me years ago that this book Peru was his one homoerotic novel. I never really got it until now. I wasn't skilled enough back then in paying attention to all the details.
...Knew that that was what I was always thinking when I was lying there in the water soaking, knew that I was always thinking that I am doing this for him, that I am lying here in this bathtub for him to come home to me and find me, that I am waiting for my father to come home to me and come up the stairs to me and come see me and find me — see not his son but me, his lady-in-waiting waiting for him — clean...
The fact is we are all waiting. In Gordon's case he was a lady-in-waiting ready for whatever happens next. Because it will. Things happen and the truth is we like to watch. In this case it is the view taken from being on our backside. And still we seem to be delusional about our very own dying. But the Lish Dalkey Archive introduction to Peru alone is worth the price of admission. Granted, Lish is an acquired taste, but this novel is definitely worth reading for any doubters out there still listening. The emphasis for Lish is always on his choice of words, and the exquisite language that follows is a given when reading any work written by Gordon Lish.
wool· intr.v. wool·gath·ered, wool·gath·er·ing, wool·gath·ers: To engage in fanciful daydreaming.
...Steven Adinoff was just woolgathering and then caught himself at it...
Was the boy who Gordon killed, Steven Adinoff, just dreaming when he got it?
In the very first paragraph Gordon Lish tells us every character he intends on showing us. The boy he killed in the sandbox Steven Adinoff, Gordon's neighbor Andy Lieblich and his nanny, the "colored" man, and Gordon's elementary school teacher Miss Donnelly. From that paragraph on Lish circles these subjects as if he were a raging-mad Comanche, deftly and finally putting his object where all of us can see it squarely in the sandbox. Early on it is known that all three boys, Steven, Andy, and Gordon, were only six years old. The rest of the characters are adults who generally are in charge of keeping children safe and teaching kids to be good playmates and to get along. We get some rather vague idea that the toy rake Steven Adinoff was using had its tines stuck in Gordon's head, which may have had something or other to do with Steven Adinoff ending up dead. The Gordon Lish I personally know is not the Lish who wrote this book or even the character in it. Lish originally wrote this novel in 1986 which numbers out to a good nine years before I met him. But I had been sending him manuscripts since 1987 and reading everything in his oeuvre to date. Much has changed with me and with Gordon since I first read Peru in the original E.P. Dutton version. For both, we have a history now and we are quite a bit older. Then there was a Sceptre edition published in Great Britain in 1987 followed in 1997 by the Four Walls, Eight Windows edition of Peru. Changes were made to all four editions of this book. It has been my personal experience with Gordon that he often changes the text throughout all of his books in the normal course of one of his gracious attempts to inscribe his name on the title page.
The Gordon on the page is in love with Andy Lieblich. He is also obsessed with the entire family. All of them. From the nanny to the "colored" man washing and waxing the Buick. Gordon wanted the life Andy Lieblich had.
...The kind of boy I wanted to be would be a boy who could not keep any fried foods down or miss his nap or not get his bath in a bathtub or even have to get a sandwich off the kitchen counter and not be served his meat pattie when it was high time for lunch or for him to have to have his milk without the chill off...
In real life I see and hear the same Gordon Lish frantic in his telling, then his calming down for a spell, and then reviving enough again to raise the bar yet another level to his sometimes manic excitement. He does this as a grown man on the streets of New York City. Gordon Lish is an amazing performance actor, on the stage or on the page, it does not matter. His words are up and down just as the rake was and then the hoe.
Today, during my daily reading period, I came across a line or two from a Thomas Bernhard novella Walking. It was a timely piece seeing that I would complete my reading of this Dalkey Archive version of Peru shortly thereafter. "...looking in the immediate proximity reveals nothing but incompetence. One should, in every case, go back over everything, says Oehler, even if it is in the depths of the past and scarcely ascertainable and discernible any longer." This is what Gordon Lish means to do. He has mental agility enough to carry this out to the nth degree. I have read a bit of Proust, nothing complete, but there is nobody for me like Lish to make me remember my childhood so vividly. Even the terrible violence that erupts on the page here, the gist of the story is the revisiting amidst immense feelings of one’s childhood and all the nuances we miss in the daily events of our adult lives. Lish, however, can make you feel somewhat icky in his accounting of a childhood murder staged in a sandbox.
There are so many ways of seeing things. First the TV news report opening the novel and then a memory from forty-four years ago. Not to mention the cab later as an adult and getting hurt again enough he has to go to the hospital to have the wound closed. And the cab driver being a "colored" man just as the gardener was while in the employ of the Lieblich family so many years ago. Gordon, the character in the book, wanted to kiss both of these "colored" men.
...Listen to this — I wanted to kiss Kobbe Koffi...
What about the shower and Gordon's hairy dad? Gordon once told me years ago that this book Peru was his one homoerotic novel. I never really got it until now. I wasn't skilled enough back then in paying attention to all the details.
...Knew that that was what I was always thinking when I was lying there in the water soaking, knew that I was always thinking that I am doing this for him, that I am lying here in this bathtub for him to come home to me and find me, that I am waiting for my father to come home to me and come up the stairs to me and come see me and find me — see not his son but me, his lady-in-waiting waiting for him — clean...
The fact is we are all waiting. In Gordon's case he was a lady-in-waiting ready for whatever happens next. Because it will. Things happen and the truth is we like to watch. In this case it is the view taken from being on our backside. And still we seem to be delusional about our very own dying. But the Lish Dalkey Archive introduction to Peru alone is worth the price of admission. Granted, Lish is an acquired taste, but this novel is definitely worth reading for any doubters out there still listening. The emphasis for Lish is always on his choice of words, and the exquisite language that follows is a given when reading any work written by Gordon Lish.
January 23, 2023
This blurb by Don DeLillo sums up the effect of this obsessive, digressive, maddening, and strangely moving novel: “In Peru, our fascination springs from the terror of compulsive memory and from the novelist’s struggle to turn it into art. It is a struggle that Gordon Lish wins brilliantly. This is a novel of mounting power -- hypnotic, entrapping, masterfully designed."
4.5 stars
4.5 stars
November 3, 2021
4.5 ⭐️
Inventive yet painfully specific novel about memory. The quoting in the first and third chapters are unlike anything I remember reading. Flows quickly and I loved the callback to many of my fellow Long Island neighborhoods. Really liked.
Inventive yet painfully specific novel about memory. The quoting in the first and third chapters are unlike anything I remember reading. Flows quickly and I loved the callback to many of my fellow Long Island neighborhoods. Really liked.
September 22, 2018
“Don’t you remember when you were six?
I remember.”
A mesmerizing, endlessly recursive account of a childhood memory involving a possibly lethal incident whilst playing in a sandbox.
A glimpsed news item on television concerning an enigmatic rooftop prison fight in Peru serves as a madeleine for the fifty-year-old narrator who obsessively recalls sights, sounds, smells, and above all thoughts and feelings from when he was a child. But the recall is very specific – “What I remember is the sandbox, and anybody who had anything to do with the sandbox, or who I, in my way, as a child, thought did.” – and is strangely limited and fragmentary. The same small shards of memory are picked up and examined over and over again, so that they become familiar, polished, and diminished. Less real.
It’s a portrait of someone who is anally retentive – literally so as a child, a “fussbudget” as an adult – someone who just can’t let go. And it’s a portrait of a solipsist – someone who imagines he is in some strange way the centre of, the motivator of, and the essential witness to the world he knows. Sounds like an author? Could be. The narrative voice in Peru is compulsive and hypnotic – so much so that I even read the novel twice. I'm not sure whether that's a recommendation, but I assure you it's unusual.
I remember.”
A mesmerizing, endlessly recursive account of a childhood memory involving a possibly lethal incident whilst playing in a sandbox.
A glimpsed news item on television concerning an enigmatic rooftop prison fight in Peru serves as a madeleine for the fifty-year-old narrator who obsessively recalls sights, sounds, smells, and above all thoughts and feelings from when he was a child. But the recall is very specific – “What I remember is the sandbox, and anybody who had anything to do with the sandbox, or who I, in my way, as a child, thought did.” – and is strangely limited and fragmentary. The same small shards of memory are picked up and examined over and over again, so that they become familiar, polished, and diminished. Less real.
It’s a portrait of someone who is anally retentive – literally so as a child, a “fussbudget” as an adult – someone who just can’t let go. And it’s a portrait of a solipsist – someone who imagines he is in some strange way the centre of, the motivator of, and the essential witness to the world he knows. Sounds like an author? Could be. The narrative voice in Peru is compulsive and hypnotic – so much so that I even read the novel twice. I'm not sure whether that's a recommendation, but I assure you it's unusual.
December 30, 2007
Though it's a short novel, I found it hard to get to the end. I certainly wanted to get to the end. I thought of little else while reading this book. So much so that it became a distraction, a further obstacle (apart from the text itself) preventing me from putting this one down as black and white and read all over.
I did finish it and I was satisfied when I closed it and sealed it up on my bookshelf. It left its thumbprint on me which I've not ever been able to shrug off. (I haven't tried all that hard.) I won't say it was a "good" read but it was a memorable (or rather an unforgetable) one and I felt good afterwards, like I had taken my medicine.
I did finish it and I was satisfied when I closed it and sealed it up on my bookshelf. It left its thumbprint on me which I've not ever been able to shrug off. (I haven't tried all that hard.) I won't say it was a "good" read but it was a memorable (or rather an unforgetable) one and I felt good afterwards, like I had taken my medicine.
December 8, 2011
Here Lish is a fantastic postmodern master. His writing style is exquisite. On top of that, he knows how to tell a story. This is a great exploration of guilt and responsibility, the identification and ownership of feelings, and coping.
The story intertwines three events revolving around one character. One foundational (his killing a child as a child), one sentimental (his preparations dropping his own child off for camp), and the last mundane (watching the news of a violent jailbreak in Peru). It interplay is intriguing and you really grow to care about this character.
It is a lovely, if rather disturbing, book.
The story intertwines three events revolving around one character. One foundational (his killing a child as a child), one sentimental (his preparations dropping his own child off for camp), and the last mundane (watching the news of a violent jailbreak in Peru). It interplay is intriguing and you really grow to care about this character.
It is a lovely, if rather disturbing, book.
December 28, 2008
My first Lish book and boy do I wonder what I was waiting for in not getting to this guy before now. This kind of writing is exactly what pushes all the right literary buttons for me: edgy, brilliantly inventive and virtuosic, witty/amusing, moderately avant garde techniques (as in time shifts, and plot fragmention). Reminds me somewhat of other favorites of mine: Beckett, Thomas Bernhard and Stephen Dixon. Will probably read Zimzum next.
October 8, 2020
https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/pe...
wool· intr.v. wool·gath·ered, wool·gath·er·ing, wool·gath·ers: To engage in fanciful daydreaming.
...Steven Adinoff was just woolgathering and then caught himself at it...
Was the boy who Gordon killed, Steven Adinoff, just dreaming when he got it?
In the very first paragraph Gordon Lish tells us every character he intends on showing us. The boy he killed in the sandbox Steven Adinoff, Gordon's neighbor Andy Lieblich and his nanny, the "colored" man, and Gordon's elementary school teacher Miss Donnelly. From that paragraph on Lish circles these subjects as if he were a raging-mad Comanche, deftly and finally putting his object where all of us can see it squarely in the sandbox. Early on it is known that all three boys, Steven, Andy, and Gordon, were only six years old. The rest of the characters are adults who generally are in charge of keeping children safe and teaching kids to be good playmates and to get along. We get some rather vague idea that the toy rake Steven Adinoff was using had its tines stuck in Gordon's head, which may have had something or other to do with Steven Adinoff ending up dead. The Gordon Lish I personally know is not the Lish who wrote this book or even the character in it. Lish originally wrote this novel in 1986 which numbers out to a good nine years before I met him. But I had been sending him manuscripts since 1987 and reading everything in his oeuvre to date. Much has changed with me and with Gordon since I first read Peru in the original E.P. Dutton version. For both, we have a history now and we are quite a bit older. Then there was a Sceptre edition published in Great Britain in 1987 followed in 1997 by the Four Walls, Eight Windows edition of Peru. Changes were made to all four editions of this book. It has been my personal experience with Gordon that he often changes the text throughout all of his books in the normal course of one of his gracious attempts to inscribe his name on the title page.
The Gordon on the page is in love with Andy Lieblich. He is also obsessed with the entire family. All of them. From the nanny to the "colored" man washing and waxing the Buick. Gordon wanted the life Andy Lieblich had.
...The kind of boy I wanted to be would be a boy who could not keep any fried foods down or miss his nap or not get his bath in a bathtub or even have to get a sandwich off the kitchen counter and not be served his meat pattie when it was high time for lunch or for him to have to have his milk without the chill off...
In real life I see and hear the same Gordon Lish frantic in his telling, then his calming down for a spell, and then reviving enough again to raise the bar yet another level to his sometimes manic excitement. He does this as a grown man on the streets of New York City. Gordon Lish is an amazing performance actor, on the stage or on the page, it does not matter. His words are up and down just as the rake was and then the hoe.
Today, during my daily reading period, I came across a line or two from a Thomas Bernhard novella Walking. It was a timely piece seeing that I would complete my reading of this Dalkey Archive version of Peru shortly thereafter. "...looking in the immediate proximity reveals nothing but incompetence. One should, in every case, go back over everything, says Oehler, even if it is in the depths of the past and scarcely ascertainable and discernible any longer." This is what Gordon Lish means to do. He has mental agility enough to carry this out to the nth degree. I have read a bit of Proust, nothing complete, but there is nobody for me like Lish to make me remember my childhood so vividly. Even the terrible violence that erupts on the page here, the gist of the story is the revisiting amidst immense feelings of one’s childhood and all the nuances we miss in the daily events of our adult lives. Lish, however, can make you feel somewhat icky in his accounting of a childhood murder staged in a sandbox.
There are so many ways of seeing things. First the TV news report opening the novel and then a memory from forty-four years ago. Not to mention the cab later as an adult and getting hurt again enough he has to go to the hospital to have the wound closed. And the cab driver being a "colored" man just as the gardener was while in the employ of the Lieblich family so many years ago. Gordon, the character in the book, wanted to kiss both of these "colored" men.
...Listen to this — I wanted to kiss Kobbe Koffi...
What about the shower and Gordon's hairy dad? Gordon once told me years ago that this book Peru was his one homoerotic novel. I never really got it until now. I wasn't skilled enough back then in paying attention to all the details.
...Knew that that was what I was always thinking when I was lying there in the water soaking, knew that I was always thinking that I am doing this for him, that I am lying here in this bathtub for him to come home to me and find me, that I am waiting for my father to come home to me and come up the stairs to me and come see me and find me — see not his son but me, his lady-in-waiting waiting for him — clean...
The fact is we are all waiting. In Gordon's case he was a lady-in-waiting ready for whatever happens next. Because it will. Things happen and the truth is we like to watch. In this case it is the view taken from being on our backside. And still we seem to be delusional about our very own dying. But the Lish Dalkey Archive introduction to Peru alone is worth the price of admission. Granted, Lish is an acquired taste, but this novel is definitely worth reading for any doubters out there still listening. The emphasis for Lish is always on his choice of words, and the exquisite language that follows is a given when reading any work written by Gordon Lish.
wool· intr.v. wool·gath·ered, wool·gath·er·ing, wool·gath·ers: To engage in fanciful daydreaming.
...Steven Adinoff was just woolgathering and then caught himself at it...
Was the boy who Gordon killed, Steven Adinoff, just dreaming when he got it?
In the very first paragraph Gordon Lish tells us every character he intends on showing us. The boy he killed in the sandbox Steven Adinoff, Gordon's neighbor Andy Lieblich and his nanny, the "colored" man, and Gordon's elementary school teacher Miss Donnelly. From that paragraph on Lish circles these subjects as if he were a raging-mad Comanche, deftly and finally putting his object where all of us can see it squarely in the sandbox. Early on it is known that all three boys, Steven, Andy, and Gordon, were only six years old. The rest of the characters are adults who generally are in charge of keeping children safe and teaching kids to be good playmates and to get along. We get some rather vague idea that the toy rake Steven Adinoff was using had its tines stuck in Gordon's head, which may have had something or other to do with Steven Adinoff ending up dead. The Gordon Lish I personally know is not the Lish who wrote this book or even the character in it. Lish originally wrote this novel in 1986 which numbers out to a good nine years before I met him. But I had been sending him manuscripts since 1987 and reading everything in his oeuvre to date. Much has changed with me and with Gordon since I first read Peru in the original E.P. Dutton version. For both, we have a history now and we are quite a bit older. Then there was a Sceptre edition published in Great Britain in 1987 followed in 1997 by the Four Walls, Eight Windows edition of Peru. Changes were made to all four editions of this book. It has been my personal experience with Gordon that he often changes the text throughout all of his books in the normal course of one of his gracious attempts to inscribe his name on the title page.
The Gordon on the page is in love with Andy Lieblich. He is also obsessed with the entire family. All of them. From the nanny to the "colored" man washing and waxing the Buick. Gordon wanted the life Andy Lieblich had.
...The kind of boy I wanted to be would be a boy who could not keep any fried foods down or miss his nap or not get his bath in a bathtub or even have to get a sandwich off the kitchen counter and not be served his meat pattie when it was high time for lunch or for him to have to have his milk without the chill off...
In real life I see and hear the same Gordon Lish frantic in his telling, then his calming down for a spell, and then reviving enough again to raise the bar yet another level to his sometimes manic excitement. He does this as a grown man on the streets of New York City. Gordon Lish is an amazing performance actor, on the stage or on the page, it does not matter. His words are up and down just as the rake was and then the hoe.
Today, during my daily reading period, I came across a line or two from a Thomas Bernhard novella Walking. It was a timely piece seeing that I would complete my reading of this Dalkey Archive version of Peru shortly thereafter. "...looking in the immediate proximity reveals nothing but incompetence. One should, in every case, go back over everything, says Oehler, even if it is in the depths of the past and scarcely ascertainable and discernible any longer." This is what Gordon Lish means to do. He has mental agility enough to carry this out to the nth degree. I have read a bit of Proust, nothing complete, but there is nobody for me like Lish to make me remember my childhood so vividly. Even the terrible violence that erupts on the page here, the gist of the story is the revisiting amidst immense feelings of one’s childhood and all the nuances we miss in the daily events of our adult lives. Lish, however, can make you feel somewhat icky in his accounting of a childhood murder staged in a sandbox.
There are so many ways of seeing things. First the TV news report opening the novel and then a memory from forty-four years ago. Not to mention the cab later as an adult and getting hurt again enough he has to go to the hospital to have the wound closed. And the cab driver being a "colored" man just as the gardener was while in the employ of the Lieblich family so many years ago. Gordon, the character in the book, wanted to kiss both of these "colored" men.
...Listen to this — I wanted to kiss Kobbe Koffi...
What about the shower and Gordon's hairy dad? Gordon once told me years ago that this book Peru was his one homoerotic novel. I never really got it until now. I wasn't skilled enough back then in paying attention to all the details.
...Knew that that was what I was always thinking when I was lying there in the water soaking, knew that I was always thinking that I am doing this for him, that I am lying here in this bathtub for him to come home to me and find me, that I am waiting for my father to come home to me and come up the stairs to me and come see me and find me — see not his son but me, his lady-in-waiting waiting for him — clean...
The fact is we are all waiting. In Gordon's case he was a lady-in-waiting ready for whatever happens next. Because it will. Things happen and the truth is we like to watch. In this case it is the view taken from being on our backside. And still we seem to be delusional about our very own dying. But the Lish Dalkey Archive introduction to Peru alone is worth the price of admission. Granted, Lish is an acquired taste, but this novel is definitely worth reading for any doubters out there still listening. The emphasis for Lish is always on his choice of words, and the exquisite language that follows is a given when reading any work written by Gordon Lish.
July 1, 2022
I picked this book up solely based on the title at a used book store last week. Turns out I should just be reading serendipitously instead of reading reviews since this is one of the better books I've read all year. Truly original and unforgettable. This would have been a 5 star read if it wasn't for the lackluster ending.
July 27, 2022
Gordon Lish’s second novel, Peru, from 1986, makes a strong case for minimalism and first-person narration. It’s about the recollection of childhood and childhood trauma. It’s also about class resentment. (“I tell you, when you live next door to someone richer, there is no end to what will enter your thoughts.”) The novel is lean and chiseled, incantatory in its rhythms and repetitions and violence. Often cited as Lish’s masterpiece.
April 17, 2022
Me: ‘But is there anything at the heart of it?’
Ed: ‘Sometimes prowess is enough.’
Ed: ‘Sometimes prowess is enough.’
July 27, 2011
The narrator of 'Peru' (1986) tells the reader a confused mixture of two stories; one of his murder of a playmate at the age of six, and the other of an accidental injury he sustained aged fifty at the hands of a clumsy taxi driver from Peru, leaving him brain damaged (it is implied). His attitude to his juvenile crime is cold, peripheral and without compunction. He is more interested in the smells and sights that caught his eye that day than he is in the motives or consequences of his part in the tragedy.
He flits without warning between the present day, where he is a father and husband, and the memories of his childhood. Oddly, his childhood recollections are far more vivid than those of his recent accident. His telling of the story is full of strange redundancies, pointless tangents and is told with a vague ineloquence.
The story is enormously frustrating in that Faulkner-influenced way - giving you context for what you're reading about only after you've been guessing for dozens of, sometimes over a hundred, pages. There's this constantly raised issue of the 'taxi' where... look, there's no benefit of enjoyment (trust me) of going into this book not knowing this, so I suggest you read this 'spoiler':
This is only revealed 5 pages from the end of the book. Until this point you really have no idea whether his injury is in 1940 or the present day; whether it is intentionally caused or accidental; whether it is to his knees or his head; whether it is his own taxi or a dangerous driver... it's all so pointlessly withheld. The Sound and the Fury is one of my favourite books of all time but I'm beginning to think whether it's done more harm than good in the long run. By the end of this book you feel cheated for paying attention so closely. There is no resolution for much of the mystery - not least the significance of 'The Roof' and the prison in Peru. The narrator has no humanity to identify with, and so the way in which it deals with serious subjects just feels downright nasty and morbid on behalf of Lish.
'Peru' is an engaging exercise in style which tricks you into imagining substance with an unearned gravity of subject matter. Without any talent for storytelling, the novelty of the prose quickly outstays its welcome and the tension collapses from the inconsequential characterisation.
He flits without warning between the present day, where he is a father and husband, and the memories of his childhood. Oddly, his childhood recollections are far more vivid than those of his recent accident. His telling of the story is full of strange redundancies, pointless tangents and is told with a vague ineloquence.
The story is enormously frustrating in that Faulkner-influenced way - giving you context for what you're reading about only after you've been guessing for dozens of, sometimes over a hundred, pages. There's this constantly raised issue of the 'taxi' where... look, there's no benefit of enjoyment (trust me) of going into this book not knowing this, so I suggest you read this 'spoiler':
Here is what happened- we lifted the footlocker up together and we got it into the trunk together and then I went to lean back in to get something off the top of the footlocker while he was slamming down the lid of the trunk.
This is only revealed 5 pages from the end of the book. Until this point you really have no idea whether his injury is in 1940 or the present day; whether it is intentionally caused or accidental; whether it is to his knees or his head; whether it is his own taxi or a dangerous driver... it's all so pointlessly withheld. The Sound and the Fury is one of my favourite books of all time but I'm beginning to think whether it's done more harm than good in the long run. By the end of this book you feel cheated for paying attention so closely. There is no resolution for much of the mystery - not least the significance of 'The Roof' and the prison in Peru. The narrator has no humanity to identify with, and so the way in which it deals with serious subjects just feels downright nasty and morbid on behalf of Lish.
'Peru' is an engaging exercise in style which tricks you into imagining substance with an unearned gravity of subject matter. Without any talent for storytelling, the novelty of the prose quickly outstays its welcome and the tension collapses from the inconsequential characterisation.
March 10, 2016
Si hubo un buen momento para declarar la muerte de la novela fue sin duda el día en que se inauguró la posmodernidad. Muerte entendida no como el fin trágico de un género, sino en el sentido de que en algún punto del desarrollo de la literatura el lenguaje y no la historia tomó el papel principal de las narrativas. En no pocos casos, casi todos ellos desafortunados, la sola idea de novela se volvió un pretexto para el artificio, como si los escritores se hubieran dado cuenta de que no bastaba con contar historias, que había que ir más allá, explorar a fondo el papel de la herramienta, es decir la palabra, en la conformación misma del mundo y de quienes lo habitan.
A Gordon Lish casi todos lo conocen por haber sido el editor de Carver o, la verdad sea dicha, el coautor de sus mejores relatos. A los cincuenta años decidió volverse escritor y un tiempo después publicó su segunda novela: Perú, la historia, si es que se le puede llamar tal, que de hecho no lo es, de un hombre que recuerda el día en que a los seis años asesinó a un compañero de juegos. La anécdota, estructurada mediante el flujo de consciencia, no es otra cosa que un prerrequisito para explorar las posibilidades del lenguaje y la construcción de la memoria. Pongo lo primero en itálicas porque, ya sabemos, cualquier cosa puede salir de eso que se ha vuelto un trademark de la narrativa posmoderna. En el más tibio de los casos será un experimento interesante. Pensaremos: vaya, así que podemos describir cosas sin describirlas, bordeándolas, destacando lo que las rodea porque una mesa no es una mesa, una mesa es lo que la palabra mesa evoca, pero bien podría ser una cuchara o un niño asesinado en una caja de arena; la mesa, nos damos cuenta, nunca importó. Está bien, a mí no me interesa gran cosa ni creo que el tema haya dado jamás para mucho (cuestión de afinidades, mera subjetividad, un poco de cansancio, debo confesar), pero lo segundo, la manera en que se arma el recuerdo, me ha intrigado siempre, por no decir que es uno de los temas que más me atraen. Perú cumple con esto último y lo hace de manera adecuada.
A Gordon Lish casi todos lo conocen por haber sido el editor de Carver o, la verdad sea dicha, el coautor de sus mejores relatos. A los cincuenta años decidió volverse escritor y un tiempo después publicó su segunda novela: Perú, la historia, si es que se le puede llamar tal, que de hecho no lo es, de un hombre que recuerda el día en que a los seis años asesinó a un compañero de juegos. La anécdota, estructurada mediante el flujo de consciencia, no es otra cosa que un prerrequisito para explorar las posibilidades del lenguaje y la construcción de la memoria. Pongo lo primero en itálicas porque, ya sabemos, cualquier cosa puede salir de eso que se ha vuelto un trademark de la narrativa posmoderna. En el más tibio de los casos será un experimento interesante. Pensaremos: vaya, así que podemos describir cosas sin describirlas, bordeándolas, destacando lo que las rodea porque una mesa no es una mesa, una mesa es lo que la palabra mesa evoca, pero bien podría ser una cuchara o un niño asesinado en una caja de arena; la mesa, nos damos cuenta, nunca importó. Está bien, a mí no me interesa gran cosa ni creo que el tema haya dado jamás para mucho (cuestión de afinidades, mera subjetividad, un poco de cansancio, debo confesar), pero lo segundo, la manera en que se arma el recuerdo, me ha intrigado siempre, por no decir que es uno de los temas que más me atraen. Perú cumple con esto último y lo hace de manera adecuada.
August 2, 2011
Reminded me of Thomas Bernhard, how the story and language is so barren that it circles around itself until it strangles you, but in a good way.
January 12, 2015
This would have been better if it was half as long, but the last 50 pages or so were pretty good so maybe it was all worth it, I don't know
January 12, 2017
Pretty unique writing style; grammatical structures I have never seen before. Sentences sometimes look like they are constructed from several parts; each one is grammatically correct in itself, but together it looks odd; like those parts overlap each other. There are also repetitions of same words within a sentence; almost like an echolalia. Here are a couple of examples:
We just didn't have a dog, and this is all that I can say I really know about it, this is all that I can say that I really know about it that we didn't.
Henry just automatically loved it, was automatically a boy who was just automatically made for camp.
I tell you, when I was six, I had the thought that I had to keep everything but everything in my mind, that it was my job, that it was up to me for me to keep it all going by keeping it all in me in my mind.
His writing has a specific rhythm and tempo. What at first can be mistaken for just a flow of consciousness, reveals itself to be a carefully crafted construction. Certain themes come in and out; the plot itself revolves around a couple of scenes and mostly flashbacks that may or may not have actually taken place.
Very original style; will seek his other work.
We just didn't have a dog, and this is all that I can say I really know about it, this is all that I can say that I really know about it that we didn't.
Henry just automatically loved it, was automatically a boy who was just automatically made for camp.
I tell you, when I was six, I had the thought that I had to keep everything but everything in my mind, that it was my job, that it was up to me for me to keep it all going by keeping it all in me in my mind.
His writing has a specific rhythm and tempo. What at first can be mistaken for just a flow of consciousness, reveals itself to be a carefully crafted construction. Certain themes come in and out; the plot itself revolves around a couple of scenes and mostly flashbacks that may or may not have actually taken place.
Very original style; will seek his other work.
December 19, 2018
Gordon Lish can certainly write but to what end ? This is one of those books about text and loved by people who love texts.The type of writing that forgets the map is not the territory and the word 'money's is not in itself 'money ', but has somehow fallen in love with the difference, well, fallen in love with being able to show that it knows the difference in three different ways in two consecutive sentences. I always ask why ?
It is a superb piece of writing in that it maintains its unique voice all the way through ,while making the reader work hard or go into a trance state to finish each sentence correctly. It has no heart though. It is all mind as disembodied entity, all inner monologue and no breath. Humans tell stories --- algorithms do this.
I will give it one piece of humanity. The description of the fatally injured six year old boy walking around in shock looking for his lost baseball card. Heartbreaking to me, but did I create this as the reader or was it an emergent property of the unintended consequences of a guy obsessed with repeating words that are words being repeated, repeatedly ?
It is a superb piece of writing in that it maintains its unique voice all the way through ,while making the reader work hard or go into a trance state to finish each sentence correctly. It has no heart though. It is all mind as disembodied entity, all inner monologue and no breath. Humans tell stories --- algorithms do this.
I will give it one piece of humanity. The description of the fatally injured six year old boy walking around in shock looking for his lost baseball card. Heartbreaking to me, but did I create this as the reader or was it an emergent property of the unintended consequences of a guy obsessed with repeating words that are words being repeated, repeatedly ?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 25, 2024
"Maybe it will be a curse on you for just you hearing this.
Tell the truth, tell the truth, didn't you just get just a little bit of a scared feeling from just you hearing this?
God didn't lift a finger."
Memory has been a major theme in the last couple of books I've read (not intentional, or was it? I can't remember...), and this one takes the approach of grinding it down to its barest essentials, or at least trying to. And did he succeed? Not even he knows for sure. In our frantic search for the truth, to what capacity does our imagination fill in the gaps?
With sparse language taking you straight into the mind and heart of a six-year-old boy, Lish examines every facet of his darkest truths through a bloodstained jeweler's loupe (his own blood, of course, from bonking his head on the trunk lid of a taxi, presumably setting off this obsessive, infanticidal logorrhea). It's hard to recommend a book about sandbox murder between children, so I won't, but the sheer power of Lish's language and churning-out of motifs has had a lasting effect. If you enjoy a good existential daymare soaked in a Long Island suburban heatstroke, then this is the beach read for you.
Tell the truth, tell the truth, didn't you just get just a little bit of a scared feeling from just you hearing this?
God didn't lift a finger."
Memory has been a major theme in the last couple of books I've read (not intentional, or was it? I can't remember...), and this one takes the approach of grinding it down to its barest essentials, or at least trying to. And did he succeed? Not even he knows for sure. In our frantic search for the truth, to what capacity does our imagination fill in the gaps?
With sparse language taking you straight into the mind and heart of a six-year-old boy, Lish examines every facet of his darkest truths through a bloodstained jeweler's loupe (his own blood, of course, from bonking his head on the trunk lid of a taxi, presumably setting off this obsessive, infanticidal logorrhea). It's hard to recommend a book about sandbox murder between children, so I won't, but the sheer power of Lish's language and churning-out of motifs has had a lasting effect. If you enjoy a good existential daymare soaked in a Long Island suburban heatstroke, then this is the beach read for you.
December 13, 2024
I chose to read this book as part of my learning about minimalism. In all honesty and sincerity, I found it a confusing read. There's no actual plot, and the narrator jumps from memory to memory without any clear pattern. You have to be paying attention to understand which memory he's currently talking about. There are more questions than answers, the narrator's memories are likely not accurate, and you never find out what really happened. It's really you (the reader) sitting down to talk with a person rambling about their past, and you've no idea if they're being truthful or just remember things wrong. I think we've all met people like that.
The writing style is definitely experimental and might not be to everyone's liking.
I'll probably read more Gordon Lish (I'm curious about Dear Mr. Capote), but I don't think I'll read Peru again. Though I did enjoy it for what it was, and I am proud to be able to say I read Gordon Lish's Peru and got through an experimental writing style :-)
The writing style is definitely experimental and might not be to everyone's liking.
I'll probably read more Gordon Lish (I'm curious about Dear Mr. Capote), but I don't think I'll read Peru again. Though I did enjoy it for what it was, and I am proud to be able to say I read Gordon Lish's Peru and got through an experimental writing style :-)
November 1, 2021
Interesting language. A middle-aged man, who is possibly on the autism spectrum, recounts bits and pieces of incidents from his childhood which made profound impressions upon him. And the snippets seem to be triggered by a violent incident he witnesses on TV, plus an injury he sustains while readying his son for camp. It's a bit hard to follow since he jumps back and forth between incidents and time periods, and I found myself turning back in the book to piece the story together in my mind. I think it was worth the effort. I would love to see a review by someone knowledgeable in the field of asperger's syndrome.
April 18, 2024
Damn it if I ever recommend this to someone. I got halfway through and put it down and said, I literally said, I said at my desk at work that I get it. And I really got it.
Anyway I really truly would never recommend this to anyone just because it’s written like a Trump speech but the trick really worked and it’s brilliant.
Anyway I really truly would never recommend this to anyone just because it’s written like a Trump speech but the trick really worked and it’s brilliant.
September 29, 2021
Gordon Lish is the complete opposite of an editor when he writes his stories; he is the lord of possibilities and baroque absurdity. Yes, baroque, although it's hard to put baroque next to his last name, but this novel is full of twists and turns, I love it!
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