The Mad Patagonian

The Mad Patagonian #1-3

by Javier Pedro Zabala (Pseudonym), Tomás García Guerrero (Translator), Peter Damian Bellis

‘Cuban writer Javier Pedro Zabala and Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño first crossed paths in Mexico City in the mid-seventies. Their very first meeting, recounted at some length in Zabala’s diary, occurred in April of 1975.’ So begins the ‘Translator’s Introductory Remarks’ to Zabala’s masterpiece, The Mad Patagonian.

The Mad Patagonian is a multi-generational epic spanning three centuries and five continents in which members of the Escoraz family are looking to find true love (and some version of paradise) in a world that has been torn apart by the random even bestial violence of Fascism in all its forms. So what does Zabala’s novel have to do with Roberto Bolaño? According to Tomás García Guerrero, the translator, The Mad Patagonian provides a competing vision, a stark counterpoint to the darker vision of much of Bolaño’s work. Guerrero believes that the novel is an effort on the part of Zabala to engage his friend Bolaño in a metaliterary conversation about the true nature of the world. Guerrero also suggests that the subtextual interplay between Zabala’s vision and Bolaño’s is crucial to understanding the novel.

The nine interconnected novellas that make up The Mad Patagonian take the reader backwards through time and history, a journey which begins in that sunny paradise we call Florida and the familiar urban/suburban American landscape of both Jacksonville and Miami in the 1990s. From Florida we then travel to the historical melting pot of Logroño, Spain during the latter part of the nineteenth century (1870-1899), where the mythic stories of two pyschics, Escolástica and Isabel Escoraz Vda De Miranda, unfold. From Spain we then head to Santiago, Cuba, circa 1900-1907, a tumultuous period in Cuban history when forgotten poets lingered in the shadows before descending into oblivion, the determined followers of José Martí were still seeking liberty and equality for every Cuban citizen, and brujería magic was a force to be reckoned with.

Next we travel to a film nourish 1950s Havana, with swanky, exclusive nightclubs overflowing with the sounds of sultry danzón singers; a world in which corrupt government officials and remorseless gangsters who read Pirandello find themselves in a battle to the death with a mysterious group of German anarchists and ex-spies who believe they are working for a sinister, alien (as in outer space) race intent on subjugating the Earth; and then we find ourselves in a contemporary parallel universe America (with one Kafkaesque detour thru parts of France, Germany, and the city of Prague) where an aging Basque immigrant who fought Franco, a World War One tank commander, Latin-American revolutionaries, CIA operatives, FBI agents, ex-poets, ex-priests, atheists, an internationally acclaimed porn star, an expert on Nazi mysticism and the occult, a modern-day saint, a Hollywood movie director who was nominated for an Academy Award, and a hairdresser from Buenos Aires who once cut the hair of Jorge Borges in a hotel room in New York City, all take their turn on center stage, and the hope of finding paradise takes on profoundly spiritual dimensions.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, American, Contemporary

1268 pages, Paperback

Published February 26, 2018

About the author

Javíer Pedro Zabala was a product of the multicultural forces that have been shaping the Americas for over five-hundred years. His father, Miguel Octavio Cercas, was born in Matamoros, a border town in northeastern Mexico. His mother, Anabelle Elizabeth Zabala, whose surname he ultimately kept, was from Miami, Florida. Zabala was born in Miami in 1950 but moved to Mexico with his father in 1964. In 1976, while living in Mexico City, he married Blanca Barutti, a recent graduate of the Facultad de Medicina UNAM. Blanca was originally from Santiago, Cuba. After a short honeymoon, the couple moved to Cuba and took up residence in a tiny cinder block house with a tin roof and a view of the Caribbean Sea in La Boca, Cuba, a small seaside village in Sancti Spíritus province. He lived in La Boca for the last twenty-six years of his life. He was unknown as a writer during his lifetime and died in June 2002 at the age of fifty-two of an aneurysm, two months after he had completed his novel, without fanfare, unnoticed by anyone save his daughter.

Reviews

[David Katzman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A new, modern (Modernist!) masterpiece of Latin-American magical realism. If you appreciate works by Gabriel García Márquez or Roberto Bolaño, then this is a book that you should pick up immediately. Or at least when it's released to the public in the coming months. This is the first published translation of the book from Spanish to English.

Zabala is sadly deceased, and The Mad Patagonian is his only novel. But what a book it is at 1210 pages that flew by. It's a sprawling, multi-layered onion of a story with intertwining narratives, diverse styles (each extended chapter or Book is unique), literary references, and complex themes that stretches from Spain to Cuba to Miami across generations. It seems to me that in some ways, the multifaceted nature and influences of this book is truly multicultural (in the grand sense of layering in many cultural, literary and ethnic influences) as an expression of Zabala's nature. His father was Mexican, his mother was American, and they moved to Cuba when he was young, remaining there for the rest of his life. Apparently he spent twenty years working on The Mad Patagonian.

There are nine "Books" in The Mad Patagonian, and each one has a different central character or characters. The story jumps back and forth in time, but eventually you realize that they are all interconnected in different ways and looping together. You read the central story of one character who becomes an incidental minor character in the next or turns out to be the child featured in the next...or the great grandmother. You see a new perspective from book to book; so for example in one story you thought a certain character was a violent criminal but then in the next story it turns out he was merely hapless and harmless. The complex intertwining of the Books within the book relates to one of the primary thematic subjects that Zabala addresses, which is the value of storytelling and the struggle to coherently construct a story with meaning...given the inherent madness of the world. How can one make sense of this "mad" world? You dig and you can always dig deeper and never understand anything. In some ways, Zabala is stating a case that is the opposite of Proust's deep dive into the detailed thoughts and psyche of a man and his experiences. Zabala's authorial layering of diverse voices, contexts and time periods asserts that no matter where you focus, there is always something you are missing, something you can't address or comprehend. No matter how much detail you strive to lay down in your story, the incomprehensible remains.

The excitable nurse read over what she had transcribed again and again, but each reading exposed even more unanswerable questions. She tossed the pad of paper to the floor, disgusted with her inability to penetrate the elusive mysteries of this deathbed confession...

This work by no means consistently falls into the genre of magical realism (sometimes it feels like a noir pot-boiler or a Joycean short story), but there are frequent mystical occurrences and coincidences that occur, that would qualify that technique as an aspect of it. There are likely as many different intentions behind the use of magical realism as there are authors who have adopted this technique, but in this case it struck me as another exploration of storytelling. The "magic" represents an author's manipulation of occurrences and characters toward some purpose. The magic is imagination, the art of writing, it's the struggle to control the work and give it intention and meaning. Zabala recognizes this aspect of manipulation clearly, and there are even some scenes that are theatrical, as if they came from a play by Luigi Pirendello, who was a Modernist playwright whose characters often "come to life" with a mind of their own. Or were generic character types without names...like "Boy," "Father," and so on. Literary contrivances rather than "real people."

Turiddu smiled and said, "We are like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk."

Another theme that struck me as I read this was of degradation. The degradation of the human condition, of our selves, of our essentially humanity. The struggles and contortions of our torturous human civilization have essentially dehumanized humanity. To survive in this cold world of economic competition and social Darwinism, we become less than animals...animals within a cultural context that resort to heartless cruelty to survive. Or delusions and naivete for those who live in a bubble of the past and religion.

I've merely scratched the surface of the literary value of this book. The craft of the writing itself, is also something to admire, and it's a book that should appeal to both realists and experimentalists. It's a book that should be taught in every Comparative Lit or Latin American lit classes and can inspire endless theses and essays. I hope it will find its way into the New York Review of Books...it deserves significant attention.

Note: I received this book free, in a giveaway, in exchange for an honest review.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Another* big fat brick from across the waters you likely won't have heard of lest you sail certain narrow and rare waters.** And this one is a doozy. Likely to be consumable by both the Literati (and Snobs and Elitists and Wankers) along with the BeachReaders and the I=Know=What=I=Liker's and the Pervs&Smuts (remember that anecdote about Lolita? this one won't disappoint that guy).

It's gleefully parallel'd with Bolaño's 2666 and why knot? This one is built out of nine (.9.) interlocking novellas of varying length. Although the interlocking interconnecting seems rather a bit more apparent imho. And too the fact that this mysterious Zabala guy had zero contact with the world of the Literati, etc ; except for having went on multi=day benders with Bolaño himself a pair of times or so (of which is recounted in the trans'ers Intro (btw RIP both the writer and the trans'r). And the trans'r is of the opinion that The Mad Patagonian offers some kind of metafictional riposte to
Bolaño's work (about which I cannot comment having not gone beyond 2666 in my own Bolaño journey).

Also, wherein Borges receives a haircut.

Me? I was totally put in mind of the story=mad John Barth. One of the stunts Barth pulled off in Lost in the Funhouse was to create a frametale*** deeper than any frametale heretofore in the entire history of literature (I did call it a 'stunt'). He went seven frames deep. Well, nothing quite that spirallingly dizzying but what you do get is a buttload of frametale and a buttload of storystorystory. Is the madness that of the author himself? Perhaps.

And too remember I've said that when your books just start to suck just head south to the continent where fiction is still magical ; in this case Cuba once again. It's almost like 'Cuba' says, "I'm so sexy you won't be able to keep your hands off me!"

I knocked this thing out in a slim two weeks. Why? Because, to use DFW's favorite evaluative word, it is simply that compelling. Also, it (and let's leave behind some more big names) reminded me of my reading experience of Against the Day wherein there were those moments I'd get this little feeling that something happened waaay back there must be (what) twenty pages ago and I'd flip back and it was a mere three (.3.) pages prior! So much packed into so little space.

Also if the criteria for the BIG FAT maximalist novel is that it could possibly never come to a conclusion, never quite pause long enough to put the front and back covers on it, that the story could forever expand, adding yet another chapter another novella wherein to tell the story of yet another (at first) apparently marginal character then this is a an example thereof ; FAT on storystorystory.

Delightful.




* In the same category (pigeon hole if you like) just from my '18 reading :: The Combinations, Now Voyagers: Some Divisions of the Saga of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, Oltrano, Authenticated by Persons Represented Therein, Book One: The Night Sea Journey, (and let's not forget from '17 :::) The Disconnected, Antagony, Book I, and the several from Library of Arabic Literature.
** my awareness and thanks owed to a certain David right here on gr.
*** Once upon a time Barth had a grad assistant at PennState but had nothing for this poor soul to work on. So he sent this poor soul on a research project to dig up as much FrameTale material as possible. How deep do you think the framing can go? Tale within tale within tale within tale.....
**** There are no footnotes or endnotes or other scholarly apparatus in this novel.

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

A flagship shelf-stopper from the stellar River Boat Books.

Is this book for you? At over half a million words, it's likely to keep you busy for a while. Luckily, the beginning is rhythmic and fast-paced. The layered complexities and dense historical detail comes later, once you get to know some key players, are acclimatized to the atmosphere, and once you revel with these frolicsome rogues for a while. In terms of difficulty, it is about as challenging as Cloud Atlas, but more than twice as long, with similarly strung together novellas, all differing in form and content and characters. It also brings to mind The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll for this reason, but The Mad Patagonian, in the end, is its own chimerical self.

As detailed in the fabulous introduction, there are many affinities between this book and Bolaño's work, and it is a safe bet that if you enjoyed 2666, you'll find joy in this expansive new offering. Due to the shifting perspective and kaleidoscopic contexts inherent in the novel, I would call the introduction required reading, if not part of the novel - a tenth layer hidden in plain sight - and it may benefit your reading experience to peruse the articles on the publisher's website after you have completed the last page, to better untangle the history of the book, its themes and integral motifs.

Rife with references to poetry, philosophy, theology, mysticism, pop culture, conspiracies, history, and much more, it does not often get bogged down by erudition or allusion. From the start, its capacity to engage the reader stems from its creative use of language and characters.

The novel explores, among a vast quantity of other themes, the pursuit of paradise, the possibility of salvation, redemption, and oblivion, and multigenerational connections, vendettas and familial gravitas and the inheritance of culture. Coherence and the malleability of history is one of its main preoccupations, leading to diverging interpretations and recursive speculation by the various narrators, protagonists and bit players.

Partaking of some elements of noir, it also experiments with barroom storytelling, police procedure, the epistolary form, diary entries, historical reportage, journalistic techniques, dream sequences, straight up surrealism and magical realism, hyperrealism (in terms of detail-oriented description), tropes of the bildungsroman, palimpsests and parallel perceptions of metaphysical reality, and a myriad of other belletristic incarnations.

Boiling it all down would never give you, the potential reader, an accurate portrait of this voluminous literary undertaking. But the key components, or driving forces of much of the chronicle are the following: impermanence, inner peace versus outer peace, the political nature of writing and the responsibility of the writer to embody the revolutionary spirit, the 'fragile mirror of our misplaced aspirations,' rebirth and renewal of the human spirit beneath the tyranny of history and cultural expectations, disappearance and the anonymity of the struggling artist, solitude versus the sacred ties of family, God's creation and man's relationship to Him, the question of whether He needs us or we need Him, a journey through the mythic realms of the past, existentialist crises and the idealist delusions of youth, the power of the imagination, the abyss of the self, the personal interpretations and quest for a satisfactory paradise, paranoia in government and relationships, the destructive and instinctual power of sexuality, religious atonement, dissolution and corruption, the transitory nature of art, the function of UFOs, inescapable uncertainty, despair and ephemeral beauty - but the more I seek to summarize, the more essential content falls by the wayside. A proper study of this book's inner recesses would necessitate a professional thesis.

Taking place primarily in Florida, Cuba and Spain, it also includes jaunts to other exotic locales, as the outreaching tentacles of war and suffering between disparate factions and progeny converge symbolically while they diversify in personification. We are confronted with unreliable narrators and criminals, along with a varied cast of outcasts, each with their own burden of hang-ups, fears, ambitions, and lusts.

The influences, according to the Introduction, of Salinger, Henry Miller, Borges (including a cameo), Cortázar, Bolaño, de Sade, Vila-Matas, Kafka, Breton, Dante, Foucault, and Nietzsche can be found in the pages to follow. But the tone - what about that? It is reminiscent of nostalgic Hollywood stills, moments in archival film, sepia-tone landscapes peopled primarily by Latin American men and women, wandering a lush, urban apocalypse of cardboard sunsets, dragging behind them like disembodied spirits their multitudinous coping mechanisms, the evidence of their own authenticity, the internal maps of escape to Devilish liaisons, always surrounded by Consumerist empires, haunted by the voices of crushed cultures, desire-laden ghosts, hypocritical tyrants, and festering with metropolitan numbness, they are the boiled beach bums and beached angelic dolphins, epitomizing shame, exasperation, and humiliation in the face of murder, depravity, disenchantment and a strangely symbolic omnipresent man with a metal detector, while their looming innocence and lost opportunities, the radiance of their souls within their bodies, their self-defeating investigations of wrongdoings, allow them to brave the seas of their own mortality, crossing an "ocean of trouble" to "paint their newborn self across the sky." Amid this crippling self-awareness and shattered faith is a tempest of doubt. Angels constantly dance on the point of a needle, and hallucinogenic, tilted reality reigns until the half-crazed rantings of our subconscious minds smack of prophecy and the ripples of our decisions are cast into the sullied sea of the future. The idea of cellular memory and reincarnation and the alternatives to the Catholic staples of belief are integrated into the legends of downtrodden representatives of the human race in this thorny masterpiece, effectively blurring the edges of its liminal space until the fictive corpus drifts into our cerebral firmament to subsume our simple complacency.

And yet. The chaos within us makes us human.

We must either accept the way the world is, or at least as it appears to be, and so we must buy into the propaganda that imprisons everyone else. Or we must embrace the world as we think it should be, what some would call paradise. But we must choose, and whatever we choose will be considered madness by those who would have made a different choice.

Life is a sort of post-traumatic stress induced by birth, and it only gets more harrowing as you age toward inescapable death. How we deal with this tragedy we call living is either our downfall or legacy.

Now,
I am wondering if I am coming down with some kind of strange Patagonian madness.

[Rick Harsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Mad Patagonian by Javier Zabala
“The color of that strange light that morning was the color of burnt hair or skin (but not a surface burning, it burned much deeper than that, a burning away of everything down to the waxen core) and eyeballs dripping with mascara and Kabuki ink stains of rouge eating like a cancer into the flesh of soft, white cheeks as white as the underbelly of dead fish or ribbon eels, but it wasn’t just the color of the visible world, it was also the color of sounds and smells and passing thoughts; it was the color of the musty, mustardy smell of freshly plowed, rumpled earth; it was the color of the incurable seeping paranoia (insanity?) that accompanies chronic betrayal, that bohemia of a thirsty soul; it was the color of the sea salt smell of toilet soap and the convulsive withering noises of trampled insects with wings like cellophane beating frantically for a few seconds and then disintegrating as easily as if life were just a cruel trick invented by a deranged mechanic or a demented Syrian demigod, a brusque, godless demise; it was the color of the penetrating acrid, cleansing smell of midnight jazz, even though it was the middle of the morning; it was the color of dark, smoldering thighs wrapped in lace lingerie wound a tad too tight and the crystalline purity of love’s deceptions and the raw, overwhelming, incomprehensible sadness of inaction, a paralyzing, blinding flash: it was the color of disordered silence, yes, disordered silence is so accurate; it was the color of the geranium pots that had been placed on steps and in courtyards all over the city, dripping with dew or droplets from an overnight shower like so many tiny mirrors reflecting (refracting?) the trauma of earlier days (though to some I am sure those droplets looked like hippie strings of metallic beads crisscrossing the cosmos, each bead containing within its sphere a miniature replica of this bubble we call the Earth): it was the color of the traffic whizzing by on NW 36th Street; it was the color of those excitable birds that one could only hear from the steps of La Campana, what were they? warbling warblers? or mutinous martins? or a covey of covetous chickadees? or yellow-billed cuckoos? or furious swallows? or is it infuriated? or were they neurotic parrots or parakeets, those lucky birds that are the augurs of life and death? or a flock of chachalaca originally imported from Central America or Mexico or even Texas for hunting club purposes but then they escaped? ‘shut up ¡chachalaca!’ you might hear someone say while listening to those birds, and then others might say, as if in response, ‘boom Shaka-laka-laka! boom Shaka-laka-laka!’ and then they would laugh and prance about to their booming boom boxes and vanish into the glare at the end of the street and the sly sky would break into a harmonica solo, or perhaps those elusive feathered creatures were the physical manifestation of the birds that sleep in all good wines, as the poet says, but whatever genus and species (Setophaga coronate coronate, Dendroica coronate, Progne elgans, Poecile carolinensis, Coccyzus americanus, Stelgidopteryx serripennis, Tachycineta bicolor, Melopsittacus undulates, Amazon tucumana, Amazona collaria, Alipiopsitta xanthops, Ortalis ruficauda, Ortalis vetula) those invisible birds on that particular morning were roosting and chattering away across the street from La Campana like paranoid idiot savants or drunken game show hosts in the limelight of a few lime trees or a few transplanted Paraiso trees (also called Cape Lilac or Persian Lilac) with their purple gleaming blossoms like baubles for a queen and their poisonous even deadly yellow fruit that falls to the sidewalk without warning.
That is a fairly accurate description of what the color of the light was like.”

So that’s what the color of one morning was like according to one character/narrator in the novel The Mad Patagonian by Javier Pedro Zabala, a February morning in Miami in 1977, witnessed at around 10 a.m. after the ‘sun had already crashed through the dark portals of the petrified pre-Adamite sky.’
There is much to say about this particular passage. For one, it is one of the few particular places in the novel where the author (or author and translator) use alliteration, that enemy of translation. More importantly, the paragraph is quite representative of the author’s digressive habit and indicative of his enormous authority, or confidence. For this passage takes place on the day Oscar and Isidora are finally going to get married, two-thirds through the second longest chapter of the book, when a full novel’s worth of promise is about to break forth into inspired action (we think), on pages 878 and 879 of probably the longest novel we are ever going to read (depending on how you tally up Musil); that is to say: this is not the time for fucking poetry! Except it’s a lovely passage and it is not mere poetry, it is the book itself being itself and it contains within it all the book would like us to know one way or another, this beautifully synesthetic, lapidarian, scumbled, bestilled, trembling, precise, multifarious, sweet, vicious, promising, discouraging, argumentative, soothing, striving, effortless, philosophical, teleological, raucous, bucolic, scatological or peschaetological, illogical, realistic tour the stars and the mud, azure paints of empty swimming pools and the bloodied skies of eternal love.

I am intent on lambasting this particular passage for its floral irritants for a number of reasons. I mentioned that this chapter was a novel’s worth—in more ways than one. This is a paperback and it was here, finally, after months of hard usage, that the book yielded—where page 772 meets 773, where Book Six (I have been calling them chapters because as this is a book itself, it must be comprised of chapters—see comparisons to Bolaño below) The Glory Days of La Campana begins—the spine had to give at some point, as I often read even a seven-kilo book in one hand, the book folded back on itself, the spine had to give eventually, and it finally did, but…IT HELD! There is a permanent gap here so that the book naturally falls open to these pages, but no actual damage was done. See the publisher about his printer if you’re looking for one.

So I open the book to page 773 and begin paging through for what I marked while reading and come to:
‘…dazzling white wedding dresses that surely cost an eye from a face…’ a brutal metaphor; and then a particular favorite of mine ‘…she was capable of biting the ghosts of broken days.’ Page 812 a cigarette burn in the upper left corner (I guess it’s on page 811 as well, in the upper right corner) (which is interesting in that this accident elicits perhaps the most important tactic of the writing of this book: not very much is what it is, or if it is, that is only because we have decided between the many other things it may be: throughout the book we are offered such choices as (chosen randomly, by turning randomly to page 404) ‘…like a nymph from the forgotten pages of mythology or an alien queen from a spaceship…’ The effect of this is hypnotic at first, regardless of the author’s skills with language, but I’m sure it would rapidly become a bore if the language were not perpetually surprising, the metaphorical world as rich as the world it describes…and vice versa, come to think of it. I come to ‘Heliodoro Jabuco Hidalgo, a hero of Cuban baseball from the early nineteen hundreds’, that extraordinary name suggesting that perhaps the Glory of Latin American Literature is something innate to the language, that those bastards got a leg up on the rest of us, probably due to a particular tragic combination of historical horrors that were just Spanish and Portuguese enough, just Incan enough, that somehow their linguistic heritage became richer than ours (exhibit #19 Archimedes Caminero, former pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, born Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic)—I think I could prove this if I were young enough to be embarking on a thesis, but I would also be inclined to point to the rare moments when our own wealth of linguistic poverty could be overcome, as in, for instance, the last three—relatively short!—chapters of The Mad Patagonian, in which Javier Pedro Zabala is writing more as a central continental European than a Latin American. And still further into this subnovel (Book 6): ‘All of which is to say that they were not stringent or resolute in their hypocrisy. I think my dead relatives just wanted to raise their voices to the tornadic winds that obliterate
all earthly desires and lay waste cities that have stood for a thousand years and send futuristic spaceships hurtling through the dark tunnel that we call the void, and when they (the occupants within those shiny, elliptical vehicles from the future) reach the other side, they find they have crash landed in the frozen snow-covered Andes of centuries ago, so they flee the scene like cannibals on the verge or starvation, or detectives in search of a high profile crime, or young, restless, relentless lovers who have suddenly and irrevocably gone blind, all in a mad dash to speak their minds before God claims the right of final judgment. This is why I think my dead relatives spoke as they did.’ And here the very words of a dead relative: ‘Yes, I can see all this in the mirror as well. But what of the deception that is unforgivable? Your beloved has lied to you through his extended silences and his mysterious disappearances. He is trying to whitewash his depravity with words, which only God has the power to do.’ And still no goddamn wedding. But, okay, I am patient, and the book is pleasing me, I can wait, and for a reader like me sometimes only one moment can make an entire universe worth the wait, or the life, or the deaths, or maybe not the deaths—we will see about that if the wedding takes place so the action can proceed and we can get out of this mid-section of the book and get to the central continental European chapters—but anyway, the moment that makes it all worthwhile for me comes on page 848 (848: a good year for Vikings and Saracens alike, if I am not wrong) after some fishermen have realized that they were overly brutal to an unlucky woman they found naked on the shore and they ask for forgiveness: ‘We are brainless, as you have surely guessed. Our heads are no bigger than the heads of falcons or ferrets.’ So finally, the morning of the wedding is nigh…but Zabala is not finished with me: ‘One cannot appreciate how utterly your life, with the diabolical cunning of the insanely jealous, can abandon you until it does so. And so it was with my grandmother. After my grandfather vanished, she became a pilgrim unto herself. Confounded by the chaste symmetries of the universe, she avoided the bright spaces that represent the unfolding of our lives and became a creature of plummeting darkness.’ That is a brilliant paragraph, poetic and philosophical, jettisoning the last clinging falsities of the readers’ bad habits before getting on with the wedding Zabala is not yet ready to present, for an event so important as a wedding gives birth to prematures before the wedding and fat ones after, which is to say a proper wedding, however improper, must have its strands twisted into a knot that cannot be cut with a chainsaw: for instance, maybe the mother of the bride has something to say to the groom-to-be before the wedding, before she approves, and in her state of high temper cares not who witnesses, and so there may be many witnesses and so many witnesses as happens in moments of heat and temper have such divergent views of a brief instance, we cannot truly grasp what happened without that we listen to the testimony of all the witnesses, be they coat-check girls or taxi drivers, delivery boys, bartenders, electricians, guests, or whatnot until we finally must come to agree that we can never know what was said or that we know precisely what we know was said but don’t know which precisely we know we know. One thing is sure, and that is that we must know that the mother ‘was trapped in the cephalic bubble of a thirsty purpose,’ which is particularly important here, in a review, because that is not a clause that Gabriel García Márquez would ever have written—Arlt maybe, or Onetti, but not García Márquez—see below near Bolaño. So that finally when the wedding comes off we are not only prepared for anything, we expect that whatever it is we get will not be what we expect. That’s what this book does to our minds…or what can do if we don’t mind, for it is also an optional trip, reading the book is like taking mushrooms with a ticket back to whatever particular reality we choose as part of the deal. There are no hangovers, that is to say, only different spaces, different ways of thinking, or, merely, an accumulation of different stories.

This finally delivers me from the trap of color of the sky on the day of the wedding of Oscar and Isidora, but lands me in that worst of places for me the reviewer: where the events of the book must be described, summarized, hinted at, judiciously set out, elided but for reason!

Not to make it hard on myself let me begin by saying that these thousands of pages of the most Iberian/Latin American of books begins with a short section featuring the protagonist Travis Lauterbach. Travis Lauterbach from Illinois. And he’s going to northern Florida, not Miami. So the action of the book’s first chapter, which is where the reader should leave off if a more or less conventional—if unresolved as yet—plot is what is desired. But that’s bullshit and I am sorry, because I already know that anyone who is interested in this book is not going to be put off by a degree of experimentation. The problem could be, though, that the first book is not experimental enough, not wild enough, too ordinary—though it is the only book I re-read once I finished the whole and I found it was quite perfect as it was for what the book needed it to be, and it was not the one sin that would shrink this book like a giant snail under a lemon shower if committed, it was not boring. And this book goes on for 1200 pages without ever being unsurprising.

So what does happen? Well, the cover is a mural and reading Zabala is like looking at an endless mural through a kaleidoscope, an imperfect image, but the best I can do, as at no point was I lost despite generations of stories of endless migration, zestful loving, the comic and the saintly, the comic saintly…and those who come across doors behind which they can ‘hear quite distinctly strange gurgling sounds, as if someone were drowning, or perhaps conducting arcane experiments to determine the electromagnetic capabilities of dolphins confined in saltwater tanks’, which is my way of saying allow me to fail in the simple task of describing the action, the guy who gets tossed into an empty swimming pool, the best female fucker in the world, the hilarious robotic gentleman in the closed tavern and the simple technique of eluding them, the other reason a fellow might need a word with a porn queen, what happens when the world of wealth and logic meets the world of truculent illogic, how many woman and men Oscar bedded, what drove Tika?, who sent the messages of doom over the ship’s radio, all that, all 1200 pages of that, is too much for me to explicate here. But I will say that things take a turn after about 1000 pages (p.979), that the collage chapter about Father Anton Kreutner of Metz, a tour de force of a kind, is as entertaining a chapter about competing philosophies of life and afterlife as one is likely to read, and that as much as I would guess that Zabala himself would be pleased to know that he pulled off that Chapter 7 all right—I did say tour de force, I myself prefer chapter 8 for the way the prose puts into play the ideas of the previous chapter. And while I find myself here at the end, let me say that, to be fair, Chapter 9, necessary as it is by laws of three, serves primarily as epilogue.

I have read but one other review of The Mad Patagonian, and as all reviews do, that review, quite favorable by the way, compared the author to other authors, particularly Bolaño of 2666 and Vargas Llosa of Conversation in the Cathedral. The book is nothing at all like Conversation in the Cathedral, which is a closed universe, nor anything like Bolaño’s 2666, being far more discursive even though Bolaño’s novel was really five novels. The Mad Patagonian, then, is borderless unlike Vargas Llosa’s masterpiece, and at the same time more contained than Bolaño’s false epic. But as the book must be discussed, at least to some degree, in terms of Spanish language literature, I suggest that it does bear comparison to the Garcia García Márquez of One Hundred Years of Solitude—though that is only perhaps the dominant voice in the book, or the one granted the most pages, for there are many, many voices, often distinct, often bleeding together. A dissertational read would be required to investigate whether or not that is a fault, though I assure you it is not, but on first read the author seems a worthy heir to James Joyce, writing each passage according to the dictates of the content.

The other comparison is to Borges, for the book’s wealth of intricate, labyrinthine arcania—it is brimming with such…to the point that the reader no longer cares in the least what is true and what is not. We do know that there were Merovingian Kings, but was Diego Penalosa governor of Cuba in 1746? There are dozens of such details, all of which are available in the sweep of the language, none of which require a pause—though during my second read, which may not occur this year, I intend to do a great deal more digging, as the book is an extremely learned text that wears its genius lightly.

In other words, The Mad Patagonian is very much like the very best of the writing it is heir to, yes, but it is also so many books in one, comparisons don’t bear much fruit.

Finally, there is a simple question that any pre-reader may fairly ask: So who is the Mad Patagonian? Well, by virtue of the Patagonian content, it is Mick, truly a mad Patagonian, who features in chapter one and less so in chapters two and three, returning to play a fairly large role in chapter 8, but not a definitive role. If he is the Mad Patagonian, the book is resting to heavily on his shoulders. That may leave our lovelorn Travis Lauterbach, yet another Anglo option. And the case may be made, but not without spoiling the book, except perhaps to come near to spoiling it by saying that some conventions of literature are indeed yielded to. Still, though the importance of the story of Travis Lauterbach is central to the philosophical core of the book, so is that of Mick, and as there is only one Mad Patagonian according to the title, unless it is meant as perhaps a condition, or a philosophical state. And I accept that either could be the case. I am certain, in fact, that I am a mad Patagonian. But to answer the question asked by our pre-reader and to get it over with so the book can be read, my answer is that Javier Pedro Zabala is the one, he is the mad Patagonian. ( )

[Derrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very good novel. It is no Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld, etc., but it definitely deserves a wider audience. I found the writing reminiscent of Vollmann even though I didn’t much like Vollmann based off of Europe Central, I did end up liking this tome.

I came to the novel knowing that the real author was Peter Damian Bellis, and I think that that that that that that fact enhances the experience.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic stuff no matter who the author really is. Not too sure what happened at the end but a great journey

[Chris Via]

Check out my review in this edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books: Volume 23, Number 3, Fall 2018 (#91).

[may · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Mad Patagonian, at its heart is a multigenerational traversal of a family tree whose nodes are temporally and situationally spread out over the western world, particularly in Cuba, Spanish Basque country and The US (Florida to be more specific). Told from varying perspectives, a vast array of characters, within or orbiting the family, detail their lives and how wars, crime, politics, familial feuds and migration to a better life displace them around the globe and impact theirs and their descendants’ lives.

Within, we have the stories of teachers abandoning their jobs after crises to explore the world and themselves, the owners of bars and nightclubs who had made their journey to the US for a better life, ex-Priests at odds with their belief, crime syndicates that devolve into chaos, miracle makers, movie stars, prostitutes and caretakers … The stories just keep coming.

Our opening 3 books set the tone incredibly well for an exploration of the family’s origins and their international displacement, that is once again closed in a powerfully emotional ending that brings all the threads together and picks up where we left off (in part 1) to traverse the globe. These were my favourite sections and contained some of the most evocative passages in the book.
The middle 3 books are more winding and longer than those that bookend them. This book goes all out on the story and rarely presents diversion chapters you tend to get in most encyclopaedics (Though this one is more of an expanded ‘genealogic’ if we were going to make some connection to the encyclopaedic novel).

-

The best comparison to make as to its structure would be Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Though The Mad Patagonian is comprised of more ‘books’ than 2666 (and clearly pays homage to far more than just the one writer), the book itself almost parallels Bolaño’s work (albeit rearranged to put the focus on the character’s stories – think Felipe Alfau – than on the wider symbolic exploration as displayed – at least to me -- in 2666).

This comparison is not comprehensive though as The Mad Patagonian, on top of providing this experience, displays a wider range of stories and experimentation with the way the stories are told. Changes in form (postcards sent, diary entries, film screenplay…) and tone (lots of changes in tone) from the stream of consciousness style the book picks up with, and the recurring style of a family member orally recounting tales from the past, keep the work fresh as you move through the chapters, and reminded me of a more subtle but similar application of form seen in Armand’s The Combinations (another recommended big newer book).

To close of the 2666 talk, Bolaño’s work feels more tightly held together by one major event and focuses on giving a symbolic or atmospheric impact (think: violence, dissatisfaction with life -- paralleled in part 1 of TMP, one of my favourite sections); The Mad Patagonian has its moments of greater symbolism (The soul, outer body experiences, life after death) but puts its weight on telling the stories of individuals and their impact on the family tree, whereas the characters are not what drives 2666*.

Overall each section of this book is highly worthy of any praise it gets. The transitions and links to each section are executed incredibly well. Characters tend to be searching for something, be it a truth, a person or meaning. Though they usually come up short of finding their destination or are faced head on with a much larger answer than they anticipated, there is always an optimistic outlook for the future, which is then picked up by another book creating all the connections between the family and the world around them.

It’s a hard book to sum up as its scope is so expansive. It is a book for our current times. Amongst so many other memorable passages of this book and tales told, I’m left with a greater feeling that it deals with keeping people’s stories alive within an ever-shifting world populace, as generations come to the end of their time here having experienced so much, paving the way for the youngest to do the same.

Note: This review is written from the perspective of one who believes this is neither a translated work and by that train of thought not the author listed. But who cares really, that means it pays homage to Latin American writers who have inspired the book, has 60 extra pages of story and by that extension everything surrounding the book is a story. Neat.

* [This is again subjective. I’d argue some of the most memorable characters in 2666 are the murdered women simply because the way the descriptions are given creates the feeling that they have been immortalised on the page. TMP has a section much like this but is executed with not as much impact (which doesn’t detract from the quality of the book as we focus heavily on one of the murders, rather than all).]

[Jim Elkins]

An Unfinished Project for a Critic

This is the first in a series of three, 1,412 pages in all, completed in 2021. The first printing and publicity materials didn't announce that the author is a pseudonym. The actual author is Peter Bellis, editor at River Boat Books, which also publishes the books.

The truth came out in 2018 in The Modern Novel and now it's on Amazon and Bellis's Librarything page.

I'd just like to point to a lacuna in the critical reception: as far as I know, there have been no further reviews of the book, and no answer to the questions posed by the writer of The Modern Novel. He wondered if The Mad Patagonian was "a practical joke," or a marketing ploy. It might be more interesting to ask why interest dropped off when it appeared the book might not be what it said it was (hasn't poststructuralism taught us that's usually the case?), when it became clear that it wasn't a translation from Spanish (isn't there a long history of books purporting to be transcribed and translated?), and when the mystery of the author was resolved (but in what sense has it been resolved?).

I'm writing this despite the fact that Bellis wrote me in 2017 promoting the book as the product of an unknown writer, saying it might be "one of the greatest books of the last two hundred years," "every bit the equal" of Bolaño's 2666 — in the end, the deceptions shouldn't matter; it's a question of the book's content.

[Kevin Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! Just, wow. When I received the book in the mail from River Boat Books it was bigger than I imagined. My son asked how long it was going to take me to read this. I honestly just couldn’t put it down. Though it’s 1200+ pages I’ve never had a more enjoyable experience. Incredibly readable as daunting as it may look. Thanks to everyone on GR for any comments on this. I’m better for having read it. Maybe one day I’ll meet someone that has read it as well. Hey, you never know :)

[Lascosas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a translation!

For many years I have lived half-time in central Mexico. I read some Spanish language novels, but mostly novels translated into English from across the world, including Spanish language translations. I heard about this book, and immediately ordered it from the publisher. An unknown Mexican novelist whose only book, at 1,200 pages no less, was translated into English. Boy was I excited...until about page 40, at which point it was obvious that 1) the novel was not a translation from Spanish, and 2) whoever wrote it, the novelist did not have the biography contained in the introduction.

I do not post reviews to Goodreads. My involvement in this community is limited to specific literary prizes, in particular the Best Translated Book Award. It was my hope that this book would be a worthy contender for next year's longlist. But sadly, no, it isn't eligible.

I am primarily writing this review to warn off anyone else buying the book because it is a translation. I did not care for the book, but that is a subjective opinion. It is a fact that this is not a translation from Spanish. So buyers, beware!

What is the reader to make of hundreds of words, phrases and sentences that are in Spanish in a book supposedly translated from Spanish into English? Absent a good explanation, the answer is that this is not a translation from Spanish into English.

When the original book contains words in a language other than the primary language, those words are not translated. If the book is in Spanish and there is a sentence in Italian, that sentence is left in Italian when the book is translated into English. The reason is simple. A Spanish language reader would encounter a sentence in another language (Italian). That otherness is retained in the translation.

Is it thus impossible for words not to be translated if the words are in the primary language of the book (in our case, Spanish words not translated into English)? Not impossible, but these would be so non-standard as to require an explanation in either a footnote or introduction/endnote. No such explanation has been provided. So...with 1,200 pages of translation, how exactly did the translator select those words to translate from Spanish, and those words to leave in Spanish? There is only one possible answer. It isn't a translation.

If it isn't a translation, then it was written in English. Yes, it is hypothetically possible it was written in some third language and translated, but that is a fantasy beyond even this book, since not only would the translator and author be different than identified, so would the language. I think the only thing we can know with certainty is that this book was originally written in English. If it was written in English, then the author is not the person listed, because that person doesn't speak English, or if he does, certainly not to the extent necessary to write this book.

The above isn't why I give this three stars. It isn't very well written or plotted, that is the reason. I'm just going to list the elements that annoyed me the most:

1. Digressions that serve no purpose.

2. Examples that go on forever (H.Miller...what does H stand for? We are given THIRY-FIVE possibilities.)

3. Connecting a person or event to something that happened too many pages previously. It is annoying to search for that minor mention 500 pages previously.

4.A book centered exclusively around men. In 1,200 pages you can't have one female who isn't a shadow or appendage of men? Not one!

5. Over and over women are walking along and their breasts, boobs, titties (particularly titties) fall out of their shirts. Really? That is an author fetish. And for this female reader, deeply off-putting.

6. Every scene goes on too long, and the writing is flaccid.

[Gage Hoefer · Rating 2 out of 5]

(Updated) Rounded down to 2 stars, because the more I think about it the more disappointing this becomes. What a shame.

I have hesitated over whether or not to round up from 2.5, and for now I think I will. That might be subject to change. In the end it felt like a whole lot of words just to say- at best- something interesting but not very persuasive, and- at worst- sophomoric.

I do think there were some great ideas in each one of the 9 parts, but it was surrounded by entirely too much excess. I am usually for a maximalist novel- on principle, I like the idea of a blown out but captivating ramble. However, with The Mad Patagonian it was the first time I’ve encountered a “literature of exhaustion” where I actually felt exhausted by reading, making my experience of the work oftentimes incredibly negative. In some ways this book takes itself entirely too seriously, and I think it contributes to this exhaustion I sometimes felt. This was particularly the case in the middle section- parts 4-6 so badly needed an editor, because on top of an absolutely stellar plotline (especially Broken Bike going insane while avoiding the Hernandez brothers, Oscar’s travails in Cuba, and Tika on the ship) was just too much pontificating. The style of part 6 almost got me to stop reading entirely, because I was too inundated with purple prose filled with mixed metaphors. This was not the only prose style taken up by the author throughout the book (thankfully), but it seemed to bleed through in most parts to greater or lesser degree.

Speaking a little more on that last point- sometimes, the change in writing style felt too much like a bad imitation of their creative inspirations. I thought the book worked best when the author was writing in the magical realist style, and wished they would have stuck with that much more instead of detours into bad Bolaño impressions or half-baked Symbolist impersonations. In “engaging with the Latin-American tradition” throughout the first 6 books, the author also seems to have picked up the horrible machismo that ran through some Latin American fiction of the time. Disregarding the meta-fictional author trick (which was neat up to a point), I could tell that regardless of who the author was, they had to be male- because this guy could not write interesting fully-realized female characters.

Another thing that never sat right with me throughout the book was how the fictional author conceit is used to position The Mad Patagonian in conversation with Bolaño- even worse to see so many reviews hold up the comparison. I would not compare almost any part of this book with Bolaño- stylistically, narratively, philosophically, etc. To me it seems like the author is much more indebted to the tradition of magical realism, and also French existentialists; anyone who makes connections to Bolaño and his work seems to miss the entirety of what he was getting at with his writing, and also what made him great. In my opinion, The Mad Patagonian is claiming laurels for itself before they are deserved.

I guess wrapping things up- there were some interesting ideas on epigenetic trauma woven in here, and (at least what I thought) the use of Kammer’s theory of seriality as an organizing principle for the middle sections seemed fresh to me. Again, it is such a shame I came away with a middling impression of this, because there were some absolutely fantastic storylines and concepts here. This wasn’t a waste of my time, and I thoroughly enjoyed many parts of the book- it just does not cohere to me to an excellent whole. Too much seems to sag under a weight of its own making.

[Larry Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll start by saying it's unfortunate that the Mexican/Cuban writer Javier Pedro Zabalo never had the chance to see his life's work published. The Mad Patagonian (his one and only work apparently) is a massive and extraordinary 1210 pages worth of great literature on par with pretty much any of the great works of literature to come out of the 20th century. It spans centuries, continents and cultures and seamlessly and effortlessly manages to link them all together within a kaleidoscope of literary styles. It's a rare work that very powerfully blends together multiple philosophical, political, narrative and historical dimensions.

There are 9 books that make up the text--all of which remind of specific writers or particular genres/ouevres. Stylistically Zabala's writing skills are a composite of these multiple influences--not all of which necessarily are Latin American. Of the Latin American influences--Borges and Bolano are particularly strong but there is an Admiral Bragueton like scene (Céline-Journey to the end of the night) in that book that could have been written by Alvaro Mutis. Bits of book 5 reminded me of Roberto Arlt (it is my favorite book)--it's set in the waning days of the Batista regime in Cuba and Rachel Kushner's Telex from Cuba would be an almost perfect companion piece to read alongside it.

The final 3 books are almost nods to Camus and to the Nouveau Roman writers particularly Robbe-Grillet. But that's just me--someone else reading this massive work might see others but I suspect they will see Borges and Bolano particularly--which is to say that Zabala was not only a great writer but a very astute reader.

Linking these different writing influences together into a 9 book epic that covers centuries, continents and cultures and getting them to blend together into not just a good story but a great story is a tremendous achievement. One has to have the writing skills and an extremely creative imagination along with the ability to conceptualize but also to bring it to a final stage of fruition to pull that off.

Anyway reading the Mad Patagonian was like catching lightning in a bottle. To me it is one of a handful of books that I'd absolutely have to have if I were to find myself shipwrecked on a desert island and to my mind it's comparable in range, multi-dimensionality and execution to my two favorite Latin American epics Bolano's 2666 and Mario Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral. The Mad Patagonian is a masterpiece work--a book you might even think about stealing if you found yourself short on cash. I would very much encourage people to go out and get a copy anyway they can.

[Sam · Rating 1 out of 5]

Made it around fifty pages past the introduction before deciding this isn't worth my time. I do get the impression that maybe it gets more interesting as you get deeper into the book but man what a bad impression the first section gives. Mediocre characters, mediocre plot, mediocre prose, nothing that gets me excited about the possibility of spending over a thousand more pages with this story. If I really wanted to be mean I'd say that the author presented the book as a translation to try and dissuade criticism of how middling the use of language is.

Also, the author seems uninterested in writing women.

(Also also, who prints a book with the text unjustified? Baffling typesetting decision.)

[Ella]

I'm not going to read this any time soon - time does not allow, nor does my book budget, but I found some interesting stuff about it & thought I should note it for when I inevitably want to read this tome:

Read Lacosa's review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

And the comments under it (particularly the first one) then my comment is below that.

This serves as my service to my future self.

[Kristi Duarte · Rating 3 out of 5]

The man who sold this book to me said its style of writing is like a mix between Gabriel García Márquez and Roberto Bolaño. It is not. I LOVE Gabriel García Márquez. I read a lot of books by South American authors. This novel (brick, really) is written in a stream-of-consciousness style, more reminiscent of Charles Bukowski than any other author I can think of. The erotic sections are the best written parts of this novel.

It's also way too long (1,210 pages) and it feels unedited, as if the author passed away after writing his first draft, and the person who found the unfinished book published it as-is. I imagine the author (if he'd had a choice) would have divided it into four or five different books, edited it to perfection, and then released it.
I tried to like it, I really did, but half-way through, I just couldn't bear it any longer. I just can't read another word of this book.

Having said that, it's not a terrible book, it's just not for me.

[Melon]

I'm posting this temporary review because I won a free ARC...

I think I'm going to have to give this one a break for a while. It/the author has been unceasingly sex-obsessed thus far; I just finished book two of nine, and the next book is called The Sex Queen of the Moulin Rouge. I tried an experiment where I randomly flipped to pages throughout the book to see if I would land on a page that didn't have a reference to sex (or that just was sex) and the answer is: pretty rarely. I may even have to DNF this. Which is a shame, because I was really looking forward to this and I can tell it was a labor of love. (Haha!) But it just may not be for me. Hopefully I'll pick it back up at some point and it will wow me and I'll update this review.
(I do not award a star rating to books I DNF.)

[Anton_Asher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magical
I'll return again and again.