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El miedo de perder a Eurídice
Like Proust's petite madeleine, the island opens up a host of images: "Island: the sum of all improbabilities; intoxicating improbability of fiction. Island: image of desire . . . All the islands formulated by human beings and all islands appearing on the maps comprise a single imaginary archipelago—the archipelago of desire." Monsieur N.'s original plan to use a Jules Verne novel about shipwrecked schoolboys as a translation exercise for his pupils becomes an obsession to collect every reference to islands he can find and to meditate on them in a diary of his imaginary travels—his Islandiary. Parallel to this quest is an archetypal love story that he begins writing in his notebook, printed in a narrow column with islands of quotations surrounding it. Voyaging and the quest for islands becomes a metaphor for the search for paradise, for the island as an imagined place where love achieves perfection. It also becomes a metaphor for writing: "Every text is an island."
Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1979
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387 people want to read
About the author
Julieta Campos
38 books11 followersJulieta Campos was a Cuban-Mexican writer.
She won the Premio Xavier Villaurrutia for her novel, Tiene los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina (1974). From 1978 to 1982 she was the director of the Mexican chapter of the writers' organisation PEN.
She won the Premio Xavier Villaurrutia for her novel, Tiene los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina (1974). From 1978 to 1982 she was the director of the Mexican chapter of the writers' organisation PEN.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 26, 2016
I read this Rilke poem, in Stephen Mitchell's translation, at my granny's funeral when I was 19:
"Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it all will your heart survive.
Be forever dead in Eurydice-more gladly arise
into the seamless life proclaimed in your song.
Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days,
be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.
Be-and yet know the great void where all things begin,
the infinite source of your own most intense vibration,
so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.
To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb
creatures in the world's full reserve, the unsayable sums,
joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count."
Any reference to Eurydice always brings it straight to mind, along with the unsettling sight of my father crying.
All of which is to say that I brought things to this text that I cannot assume will be there for others.
Regardless, despite its occasional lyrical over-ripeness, this is an excellent little novel, very much in the tradition of Schmidt and Rios and others like them (though not at the level of etyms, more in the sense of having multiple things going on on each page - there are no joycean compound words, and she is perhaps a little too woolly and poetic at times - hence only getting 4 stars from me). If those authors tickle your fancy, then I have little doubt this will too.
"Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it all will your heart survive.
Be forever dead in Eurydice-more gladly arise
into the seamless life proclaimed in your song.
Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days,
be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.
Be-and yet know the great void where all things begin,
the infinite source of your own most intense vibration,
so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.
To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb
creatures in the world's full reserve, the unsayable sums,
joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count."
Any reference to Eurydice always brings it straight to mind, along with the unsettling sight of my father crying.
All of which is to say that I brought things to this text that I cannot assume will be there for others.
Regardless, despite its occasional lyrical over-ripeness, this is an excellent little novel, very much in the tradition of Schmidt and Rios and others like them (though not at the level of etyms, more in the sense of having multiple things going on on each page - there are no joycean compound words, and she is perhaps a little too woolly and poetic at times - hence only getting 4 stars from me). If those authors tickle your fancy, then I have little doubt this will too.
Read
June 1, 2016A rather delightfully bookish nugget. Just listen to this lovely list of lovers ::
Now if that doesn't just melt your heart, you're a cold=soul'd bastard.
Once upon a time there was a couple: the ideal couple, the perfect couple, the archetypal couple, who would combine in their two faces the features of all the lovers of history, all those who might have been able to fall in love with each other, all those ever imagined by the poets and all those unimagined yet. They were (or would be)
Abelard and Héloïse
Venus and Tannhäuser
Hamlet and Ophelia
Agathe and Ulrich
Solomon and the Shulamite maiden
the Consul and Yvonne
Daphnis and Chloë
Percy and Mary Shelley
the narrator and Albertine
Jocasta and Oedipus
Hans Castorp and Clavdi Chauchat
Pygmalion and Galatea
Othello and Desdemona
Penelope and Ulysses
Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval
Laura and Petrarch
Humbert Humbert and Lolita
Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
Alonso Quijano and Dulcinea
Leda and the Swan
Adam and Eve
Wagner and Cosima
Pelléas and Mélisande
Cleopatra and Mark Antony
Calisto and Melibea
Faust and Gretchen
Orpheus and Eurydice
Romeo and Juliet
Heathcliff and Cathy
Tristan and Isolde
Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salome
Jason and Medea
Miranda and Ferdinand
Kafka and Milena
Electra and Agamemnon
Don Juan and Thisbe
Von Aschenbach and Tadzio
Poe and Annabel Lee
Borges and Matilde Urbach.
As the curtain rises they are kissing each other passionately in the middle of a steamy, shadowed park, underneath the pines.
Now if that doesn't just melt your heart, you're a cold=soul'd bastard.
May 16, 2020
Deceptively slim, embodied with the grace and power of the depicted dancing duo. The topoi of islands resonates well with Coleman Dowell's Island People, another Paracletian offering from Dalkey which I recently read and which likewise exceeded my expectations for better and worse. Campos's prose surges with lyrical currents that sometimes drift past the landing, sometimes crash on the shore, but always ride a tide of eloquence and acuity. A high water mark in the literature of love, and vice versa.
July 16, 2015
As a foray into the inner caverns of consciousness, The Fear of Losing Eurydice is not an easy book to follow. While navigating my way through this literary labyrinth I found myself asking lots of questions: Who’s speaking? Where in the world are we? Do physical laws apply here? What time is it? Does time exist in any meaningful sense? Wait, who’s speaking again?
The Fear of Losing Eurydice is not an artistic interpretation of the world as Campos knows it. Rather, this “novel” is a unique blend of the literary, the philosophical, the surrealist and the avant-garde. Campos, a lifelong student of all things literary, uses an array of established forms and mechanisms to shape her own anti-form. But the resulting literary construct, however it’s ultimately defined or categorized, is of little importance. This book is about getting consumed in a maze of love, desire and the voyeurism of writing.
This text is deeply philosophical but by no means dry. Campos frequently gets lost in the expanse of her own descriptions, leading the reader into a state of sensual and intellectual overload. Here is Campos describing what I believe is a scene from a dream: “Excessive, obsessed, proliferating mirrors, which will multiply gestures many times and play with the ghosts of other presences, witnesses who will imitate the gestures of still others.” Here she is describing a Caribbean street that may or may not function as a time-space vortex as well: “The pavement, softened by the heat, gives off a light vapor that slows the speed of bodies and retards timepieces as if an invisible apparatus were projecting something that, outside of its own space and its own time, must have been happening elsewhere and in another temporal sequence.”
Identifying and deciphering a specific narrative point of view is nearly impossible — which is what I think Campos was trying to accomplish. One of the reasons it’s so difficult to understand who is speaking is because Campos bestows consciousness upon everything, persons and inanimate objects alike. To follow Campos’ language is to enter a dream-like state of mind where individual consciousness cedes way to a collective consciousness. Like the raucous combination of cheers before a headlining band takes the stage, this mass voice simultaneously drowns out and amplifies the individual voice.
Campos doesn’t try to tell a single story, but a series of stories that, taken together, attempt to encompass even more. “To tell the story of the couple is to tell the story of another couple which is another story, but it is the same one,” Campos writes. However, this expansive approach, coupled with Campos’ highly stylized language, makes it hard to ascertain what, if anything, is actually happening. Cause and effect have little to no meaning in Campos’ narrative. Desire rules all. Physical actions stemming from this desire are less important.
Monsieur N. is the only real “character” in this novel. An aloof French professor, he sits at the Minos Palace café somewhere in the Caribbean, talking to himself, imagining things, grading his students’ papers (which are translations of writings by Jules Verne). One actual “event” that occurs in this story is when Monsieur N. draws a picture of an island on a cocktail napkin. This simple act of bored creation opens up a rabbit hole through which Monsieur N. and the reader fall into alternate worlds. A love story takes shape alongside the story of people shipwrecked á la Robinson Crusoe. It’s all thoroughly ridiculous.
About halfway through the novel, Campos gives the reader a little more explanation of what is physically happening in this story. Monsieur N., stepping out of his imaginative love world for a moment, talks about what he’s actually doing in the “real” world and how it relates to his fantasies: “And I write as if I were dreaming. Or dream as if I were writing. I finally discover that no other manner of saying it would matter. The story of love is a dream that is writing me. There is a lake, an island, a couple, and some survivors from a shipwreck all crowding quite naturally into the dream without seeming intrusive, because the coherence of dreams owes very little to the logic of day. The island is suggested in a sketch on a white napkin… Because once subject to the dream and a participant in the game, it only remains for me to sink into the one, which is to give in blindly to the euphoria of the other.”
In the next entry from the “real” world, we find out that Monsieur N. has actually fallen asleep, at least for some portion of time, at the café where he was scribbling on his cocktail napkin: “And Monsieur N. probably would have gone on dreaming placidly if the waiter had not come to shake him, letting him know discreetly that some of the customers were beginning to complain about his snoring.” Monsieur N, “without being bothered in the least,” says of his dream: “that dreamed voyage had communicated a deeper wisdom than that of his books.” It makes sense that Monsieur N. writes the following in his journal: “Man is the lord of all.” Monsieur N. is actively participating in the creation of different levels of consciousness simply by thinking them up, writing about them, playing with thoughts and characters and stories. But really he’s just falling asleep like a drunken old man.
Campos places little emphasis on setting. Physical place means far less to Campos than some other writers whose works I’ve read this year, Roberto Bolano or Amos Oz for example, who weave character and place together and harness the complexities of both. Campos refers to Monsieur N. being in the Caribbean as he writes on his napkin, and there are several notes about the island’s humidity and the sea breeze, but the essence of the place remains elusive. Again, I think this is all part of Campos’ plan to remove the writer from the comfort zone of physical reality. Venice comes up during Monsieur N.’s imagining: “Isn’t the whole city, after all, the most undisguised and lavish stage set ever?” Yes, there’s the desert island with the stranded people, but not much ever happens there. For the most part, characters do not interact with their environment. To Campos, what matters is not the physical attributes of a place, or what activities one conducts in that place. What matters is the mind’s ability to create its own place and time, an amorphous state free from any of the rules or limitations of physical place.
Monsieur N., his students, the love story in his head, the shipwrecked souls, Campos tries to weave all of these threads together. It’s up to each individual reader to determine whether the result is a stronger cord of story or whether the threads get knotted up in a big mess. (I’m leaning toward the mess.) Campos’ eclecticism is even more obvious in her use of marginalia, where she quotes from various prose, poetic and historical texts. The continuous referencing of J.L. Borges highlights Campos’ ideas about the universality of story and the interrelation of consciousness and literature. But, like Borges, Campos’ extensive knowledge of literary, historical and philosophical texts, means her frame of reference far exceeds that of the average reader. And her specific references in the margins tend toward the highbrow and obscure.
Given Campos’ love for the theoretical, it makes sense that she challenges the concrete nature of time in this book: “There is always the incessant melody of time: time that is extinguished, time that is reborn. In a brief lapse between birth and death, every human fulfills his or her destiny — or attempts to refute it.” Time, rather than dictating the narrative process, is practically useless. Instead, the focus is on “the ephemeral eternity of an instant,” which is the ultimate arbiter of experience.
Near the end of the book, Monsieur N. is engaged in one of his mental masturbation sessions when a first-person narrator sneaks in. Functioning as part of this collective consciousness, the narrator offers this idea about the relationship between time and story: “I believe I have forgotten to mention that anything can be told under the pretense of reproducing a real, concrete, quotidian event; it can be related as a fantasy of those who are living it, or as a dream of the one telling it. The story that I had wished to relate and that I have told might also have been told in some other way.”
This idea permeates the entire book: that each story, despite its unique attributes, is ultimately arbitrary. [This] could have happened [that] way. [That] could have happened [thusly]. The road you travel may be a windy one, but any other road would’ve brought you to the same place.
In an entry from the love story in Monsieur N.’s head, a woman bids her lover goodbye and offers him a piece of parting advice. I think this quote sums up what Campos is saying about the arbitrary nature of story: “Don’t remember too much about anything. Not even this encounter. It doesn’t happen every day, but it’s not extraordinary either. Learn to practice forgetfulness. It’s only the other side of memory. You mustn’t be afraid of it. Yield to forgetfulness, the same way you have yielded to me — with passion.”
In Fear, Campos is always wondering what it means to be a writer. Diane E. Marting, in her book Spanish American Women Writers: A Bio- Bibliographical Source Book, argues that Campos’s “narrative works are simultaneously a theoretical insight into the writing process and a praxis of those theories.” With the divergent storylines, the long-winded riffs on intangible ideas, what keeps this book together is Campos’ focus on the process of writing and what motivates one to create an alternate reality.
In an interview with Bomb Magazine, Campos says, “I had explored, almost obsessively, the motives of the desire to write. I yearned to observe myself in the process of gestation that leads to a book’s birth.” This comment struck me as very relevant to Fear. While reading this book, I get this constant sense that I am reading something as it is being written.
Near the end of the book, the reader gets a whole lot of meaty stuff about the process of writing and what it means to write, what drives someone to engage in this absurd activity. The writer, exemplified through Monsieur N., is, “someone who is always and forever an outsider; a scene that condemns one to voyeurism and establishes the model of the triangle? Or an allusion to the image of God proffering the world his discourse? Because it is then that the curtain really rises and the action begins, and attempting to tell a story is to mimic unsuccessfully that desire of God — a mimicry that is always pathetic and that every story segregates, like the suspicion of the untranslatable, in the space where it is displayed.”
If a writer continues walking down this path, where does it lead? Well, for Monsieur N., it leads to a kind of literary limbo, a state of mind in which he is always writing but never satisfied, always moving but never arriving anywhere. By the end of the book, it becomes clear that Monsieur N. isn’t just eccentric and imaginative — he acts like an insane person. He stops people on the street and raves to them about his imaginary islands and whatnot. He has been spending so much time reading and writing that it has physically harmed him: “The fervor of reading not only upsets his spirit but ravages his body too: Monsieur N. has begun to lose weight, visibly.”
Near the end of the love story in his head, the woman tells her lover yet again to learn to forget. Then, in the “real” story, Monsieur N. says to himself, “I have forgotten all the rest, but I am at peace.” I’m not so sure I’d call his state of mind peaceful. But, then again, if he thinks it, doesn’t that make it real? At least that’s what Campos asks us to consider.
The Fear of Losing Eurydice is not an artistic interpretation of the world as Campos knows it. Rather, this “novel” is a unique blend of the literary, the philosophical, the surrealist and the avant-garde. Campos, a lifelong student of all things literary, uses an array of established forms and mechanisms to shape her own anti-form. But the resulting literary construct, however it’s ultimately defined or categorized, is of little importance. This book is about getting consumed in a maze of love, desire and the voyeurism of writing.
This text is deeply philosophical but by no means dry. Campos frequently gets lost in the expanse of her own descriptions, leading the reader into a state of sensual and intellectual overload. Here is Campos describing what I believe is a scene from a dream: “Excessive, obsessed, proliferating mirrors, which will multiply gestures many times and play with the ghosts of other presences, witnesses who will imitate the gestures of still others.” Here she is describing a Caribbean street that may or may not function as a time-space vortex as well: “The pavement, softened by the heat, gives off a light vapor that slows the speed of bodies and retards timepieces as if an invisible apparatus were projecting something that, outside of its own space and its own time, must have been happening elsewhere and in another temporal sequence.”
Identifying and deciphering a specific narrative point of view is nearly impossible — which is what I think Campos was trying to accomplish. One of the reasons it’s so difficult to understand who is speaking is because Campos bestows consciousness upon everything, persons and inanimate objects alike. To follow Campos’ language is to enter a dream-like state of mind where individual consciousness cedes way to a collective consciousness. Like the raucous combination of cheers before a headlining band takes the stage, this mass voice simultaneously drowns out and amplifies the individual voice.
Campos doesn’t try to tell a single story, but a series of stories that, taken together, attempt to encompass even more. “To tell the story of the couple is to tell the story of another couple which is another story, but it is the same one,” Campos writes. However, this expansive approach, coupled with Campos’ highly stylized language, makes it hard to ascertain what, if anything, is actually happening. Cause and effect have little to no meaning in Campos’ narrative. Desire rules all. Physical actions stemming from this desire are less important.
Monsieur N. is the only real “character” in this novel. An aloof French professor, he sits at the Minos Palace café somewhere in the Caribbean, talking to himself, imagining things, grading his students’ papers (which are translations of writings by Jules Verne). One actual “event” that occurs in this story is when Monsieur N. draws a picture of an island on a cocktail napkin. This simple act of bored creation opens up a rabbit hole through which Monsieur N. and the reader fall into alternate worlds. A love story takes shape alongside the story of people shipwrecked á la Robinson Crusoe. It’s all thoroughly ridiculous.
About halfway through the novel, Campos gives the reader a little more explanation of what is physically happening in this story. Monsieur N., stepping out of his imaginative love world for a moment, talks about what he’s actually doing in the “real” world and how it relates to his fantasies: “And I write as if I were dreaming. Or dream as if I were writing. I finally discover that no other manner of saying it would matter. The story of love is a dream that is writing me. There is a lake, an island, a couple, and some survivors from a shipwreck all crowding quite naturally into the dream without seeming intrusive, because the coherence of dreams owes very little to the logic of day. The island is suggested in a sketch on a white napkin… Because once subject to the dream and a participant in the game, it only remains for me to sink into the one, which is to give in blindly to the euphoria of the other.”
In the next entry from the “real” world, we find out that Monsieur N. has actually fallen asleep, at least for some portion of time, at the café where he was scribbling on his cocktail napkin: “And Monsieur N. probably would have gone on dreaming placidly if the waiter had not come to shake him, letting him know discreetly that some of the customers were beginning to complain about his snoring.” Monsieur N, “without being bothered in the least,” says of his dream: “that dreamed voyage had communicated a deeper wisdom than that of his books.” It makes sense that Monsieur N. writes the following in his journal: “Man is the lord of all.” Monsieur N. is actively participating in the creation of different levels of consciousness simply by thinking them up, writing about them, playing with thoughts and characters and stories. But really he’s just falling asleep like a drunken old man.
Campos places little emphasis on setting. Physical place means far less to Campos than some other writers whose works I’ve read this year, Roberto Bolano or Amos Oz for example, who weave character and place together and harness the complexities of both. Campos refers to Monsieur N. being in the Caribbean as he writes on his napkin, and there are several notes about the island’s humidity and the sea breeze, but the essence of the place remains elusive. Again, I think this is all part of Campos’ plan to remove the writer from the comfort zone of physical reality. Venice comes up during Monsieur N.’s imagining: “Isn’t the whole city, after all, the most undisguised and lavish stage set ever?” Yes, there’s the desert island with the stranded people, but not much ever happens there. For the most part, characters do not interact with their environment. To Campos, what matters is not the physical attributes of a place, or what activities one conducts in that place. What matters is the mind’s ability to create its own place and time, an amorphous state free from any of the rules or limitations of physical place.
Monsieur N., his students, the love story in his head, the shipwrecked souls, Campos tries to weave all of these threads together. It’s up to each individual reader to determine whether the result is a stronger cord of story or whether the threads get knotted up in a big mess. (I’m leaning toward the mess.) Campos’ eclecticism is even more obvious in her use of marginalia, where she quotes from various prose, poetic and historical texts. The continuous referencing of J.L. Borges highlights Campos’ ideas about the universality of story and the interrelation of consciousness and literature. But, like Borges, Campos’ extensive knowledge of literary, historical and philosophical texts, means her frame of reference far exceeds that of the average reader. And her specific references in the margins tend toward the highbrow and obscure.
Given Campos’ love for the theoretical, it makes sense that she challenges the concrete nature of time in this book: “There is always the incessant melody of time: time that is extinguished, time that is reborn. In a brief lapse between birth and death, every human fulfills his or her destiny — or attempts to refute it.” Time, rather than dictating the narrative process, is practically useless. Instead, the focus is on “the ephemeral eternity of an instant,” which is the ultimate arbiter of experience.
Near the end of the book, Monsieur N. is engaged in one of his mental masturbation sessions when a first-person narrator sneaks in. Functioning as part of this collective consciousness, the narrator offers this idea about the relationship between time and story: “I believe I have forgotten to mention that anything can be told under the pretense of reproducing a real, concrete, quotidian event; it can be related as a fantasy of those who are living it, or as a dream of the one telling it. The story that I had wished to relate and that I have told might also have been told in some other way.”
This idea permeates the entire book: that each story, despite its unique attributes, is ultimately arbitrary. [This] could have happened [that] way. [That] could have happened [thusly]. The road you travel may be a windy one, but any other road would’ve brought you to the same place.
In an entry from the love story in Monsieur N.’s head, a woman bids her lover goodbye and offers him a piece of parting advice. I think this quote sums up what Campos is saying about the arbitrary nature of story: “Don’t remember too much about anything. Not even this encounter. It doesn’t happen every day, but it’s not extraordinary either. Learn to practice forgetfulness. It’s only the other side of memory. You mustn’t be afraid of it. Yield to forgetfulness, the same way you have yielded to me — with passion.”
In Fear, Campos is always wondering what it means to be a writer. Diane E. Marting, in her book Spanish American Women Writers: A Bio- Bibliographical Source Book, argues that Campos’s “narrative works are simultaneously a theoretical insight into the writing process and a praxis of those theories.” With the divergent storylines, the long-winded riffs on intangible ideas, what keeps this book together is Campos’ focus on the process of writing and what motivates one to create an alternate reality.
In an interview with Bomb Magazine, Campos says, “I had explored, almost obsessively, the motives of the desire to write. I yearned to observe myself in the process of gestation that leads to a book’s birth.” This comment struck me as very relevant to Fear. While reading this book, I get this constant sense that I am reading something as it is being written.
Near the end of the book, the reader gets a whole lot of meaty stuff about the process of writing and what it means to write, what drives someone to engage in this absurd activity. The writer, exemplified through Monsieur N., is, “someone who is always and forever an outsider; a scene that condemns one to voyeurism and establishes the model of the triangle? Or an allusion to the image of God proffering the world his discourse? Because it is then that the curtain really rises and the action begins, and attempting to tell a story is to mimic unsuccessfully that desire of God — a mimicry that is always pathetic and that every story segregates, like the suspicion of the untranslatable, in the space where it is displayed.”
If a writer continues walking down this path, where does it lead? Well, for Monsieur N., it leads to a kind of literary limbo, a state of mind in which he is always writing but never satisfied, always moving but never arriving anywhere. By the end of the book, it becomes clear that Monsieur N. isn’t just eccentric and imaginative — he acts like an insane person. He stops people on the street and raves to them about his imaginary islands and whatnot. He has been spending so much time reading and writing that it has physically harmed him: “The fervor of reading not only upsets his spirit but ravages his body too: Monsieur N. has begun to lose weight, visibly.”
Near the end of the love story in his head, the woman tells her lover yet again to learn to forget. Then, in the “real” story, Monsieur N. says to himself, “I have forgotten all the rest, but I am at peace.” I’m not so sure I’d call his state of mind peaceful. But, then again, if he thinks it, doesn’t that make it real? At least that’s what Campos asks us to consider.
July 13, 2008
Melissa asked what this book was about, and I told her I wasn't sure, but that there was a couple who were in love, an island, lots of parks, a carnival, and a cafe where the couple drank frozen cocktails and a reader sat drinking mint tea. She said it sounded like a novel she'd like to be in, and then we made iced mint tea and read until bedtime.
It's a beautifully written book, full of concepts I didn't care to keep up with because each sentence was so gorgeous. I can't believe nobody I know has ever recommended that I read this book, much less that I've never even heard of it until this week. If you've all been reading it and keeping the secret from me, I hate you.
It's a beautifully written book, full of concepts I didn't care to keep up with because each sentence was so gorgeous. I can't believe nobody I know has ever recommended that I read this book, much less that I've never even heard of it until this week. If you've all been reading it and keeping the secret from me, I hate you.
November 28, 2018
Un buen cuento para sentir que se sueña con el amor que siempre se ha deseado.
July 11, 2019
Garbled, dense, obfuscating, beautiful prose with no real storytelling - which isn't a bad thing necessarily.
As Campos writes: "I believe I have forgotten to mention that anything can be told under the pretense of reproducing a real, concrete, quotidian event; it can related as a fantasy of those who are living it, or as a dream of the one telling it. The story that I had wished to relate and that I have told might have also been told in some other way. Since that other possibility has always remained latent, I have no other remedy than to yield my right to speak to another voice"
As Campos writes: "I believe I have forgotten to mention that anything can be told under the pretense of reproducing a real, concrete, quotidian event; it can related as a fantasy of those who are living it, or as a dream of the one telling it. The story that I had wished to relate and that I have told might have also been told in some other way. Since that other possibility has always remained latent, I have no other remedy than to yield my right to speak to another voice"
May 29, 2021
This is one of these reviews that is less of a review than an extrapolation into the themes behind the book.
There are multiple stories within this novel. There is the tale of a Mr. N as he attempts to write a love story based on the theme of islands. There is the love story itself. And there are random quotes about islands in the margins. There is also a first-person narrator who comes in and out near the end. These four points of view interweave with one another in an elegiac and thematically resonant way that relies on allusion and metatextual elements that range from elegant in their application to a tiny bit overbearing.
I’ll get into the “literary” part of it in a bit, but in terms of character and plot, there isn’t a lot. The novel isn’t meant to provide you with any of this though, so I’m not rating it as I do a regular work of fiction, but I wanted to get that out there for those who aren’t sure what this book is. It’s literary fiction - it’s meant to be challenging and confounding at times. It’s an experiment, a meditation on not just love but inspiration, and how they work hand in hand to conflate and encourage one another. It’s about imagination and how writers form ideas. One small scribble in the margins, a sketch on a napkin, a list of previous thematically inspiring quotations - anything and everything can give rise to art. Love in this novel is both love as we know it, but also the love of creation, of craft. The love of a writer for writing, as much as it can make us go mad with longing, keep us up at night, and make us feel like something we know we can have, a fantastic story, is just out of reach.
Of course, the title has relevance here. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice, not just the story itself, but the concept of desire and possession and Eros and Thanatos being interlinked runs through the novel, as one would expect.
Yet, I will say, in terms of readability, while I enjoyed the rather confusing way the text interwove and spiralled around itself, the few times she listed off various items/people/works didn’t do much for me as it took away from the otherwise lyrical prose. The middle of the novel dips slightly in interest.
Overall, I really enjoyed diving deeply into this novel. There were several passages that were quite lovely/thought-provoking, which I’ll list below. Anyone who enjoys thoughtful, contemplative literary fiction will enjoy this.
“All of Verne is the story of a story of love postponed to infinity, never told, as if that prolonging of expectation, that deferment of the tension of desire over an infinite span would generate the most incisive of enjoyments: that of anticipating the greatest rapture without succeeding in consummating it.”
“He wrote a poem which he then forgot because the words, pursuing the leaves, simply scattered: a poem of augury, of desires, of catastrophes, storms, and shipwrecks, of nights and islands.”
“They will discover, by watching the black sky, that the sweetened alcohol is infinitely, gently nauseating and that the moon, sliding like an ancient parchment across the endless hollow of the night, is another island.”
“... the slow, secret slide of the afternoon into night; the furtive voracious and aggressive tendernesses; the loneliness mutually respected; the ephemeral eternities; the distant fusions; the effusive boredom; the impatient surroundings.”
There are multiple stories within this novel. There is the tale of a Mr. N as he attempts to write a love story based on the theme of islands. There is the love story itself. And there are random quotes about islands in the margins. There is also a first-person narrator who comes in and out near the end. These four points of view interweave with one another in an elegiac and thematically resonant way that relies on allusion and metatextual elements that range from elegant in their application to a tiny bit overbearing.
I’ll get into the “literary” part of it in a bit, but in terms of character and plot, there isn’t a lot. The novel isn’t meant to provide you with any of this though, so I’m not rating it as I do a regular work of fiction, but I wanted to get that out there for those who aren’t sure what this book is. It’s literary fiction - it’s meant to be challenging and confounding at times. It’s an experiment, a meditation on not just love but inspiration, and how they work hand in hand to conflate and encourage one another. It’s about imagination and how writers form ideas. One small scribble in the margins, a sketch on a napkin, a list of previous thematically inspiring quotations - anything and everything can give rise to art. Love in this novel is both love as we know it, but also the love of creation, of craft. The love of a writer for writing, as much as it can make us go mad with longing, keep us up at night, and make us feel like something we know we can have, a fantastic story, is just out of reach.
Of course, the title has relevance here. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice, not just the story itself, but the concept of desire and possession and Eros and Thanatos being interlinked runs through the novel, as one would expect.
Yet, I will say, in terms of readability, while I enjoyed the rather confusing way the text interwove and spiralled around itself, the few times she listed off various items/people/works didn’t do much for me as it took away from the otherwise lyrical prose. The middle of the novel dips slightly in interest.
Overall, I really enjoyed diving deeply into this novel. There were several passages that were quite lovely/thought-provoking, which I’ll list below. Anyone who enjoys thoughtful, contemplative literary fiction will enjoy this.
“All of Verne is the story of a story of love postponed to infinity, never told, as if that prolonging of expectation, that deferment of the tension of desire over an infinite span would generate the most incisive of enjoyments: that of anticipating the greatest rapture without succeeding in consummating it.”
“He wrote a poem which he then forgot because the words, pursuing the leaves, simply scattered: a poem of augury, of desires, of catastrophes, storms, and shipwrecks, of nights and islands.”
“They will discover, by watching the black sky, that the sweetened alcohol is infinitely, gently nauseating and that the moon, sliding like an ancient parchment across the endless hollow of the night, is another island.”
“... the slow, secret slide of the afternoon into night; the furtive voracious and aggressive tendernesses; the loneliness mutually respected; the ephemeral eternities; the distant fusions; the effusive boredom; the impatient surroundings.”
October 6, 2025
"Aprende a ejercitar el olvido. Es tan sólo el revés de la memoria" Julieta Campos
December 16, 2008
It was okay. Too much like the theorists writing novels -- Sontag and CIxous.
About islands - a guy writing about islands and lovers, with thoughts about those interspersed
About islands - a guy writing about islands and lovers, with thoughts about those interspersed
August 25, 2018
if you like Jorge Luis Borges and George Perec this is a lovely threat
it demonstrate how you need not a story to tell a story
it demonstrate how you need not a story to tell a story
December 30, 2024
I'm not sure enough has been said in the reviews about what this book wants to say about love.
I think Campos can be quite cynical, as in this unspooling, surrealistic narrative, lovers continuously invent and replace each other. They are also often described as actors and the environment of the island as a set piece in a play that keeps occurring over and over. She even says: "Love is a matter of skins. Skins that attract each other, and skins that repel each other. It does not believe in grand passions, in fatal attractions, in lifetime ties." This quote in particular makes me wonder if we are all just masks loving masks. Ditto the title: Eurydice is certainly the perfect myth to bring in when it comes to voyeurism, as lovers in this novel bask in the pleasure of seeing and being seen.
It seems that for Campos, it is the aura of love that is important to us, the secretions of fantasy that congeal around our lovers:
"While walking along the strand she has had the impression of being watched. Her body secretes something gentle and sweet. The gaze touches her and wraps her in a gelatinous substance, in amber still uncongealed...A body, left to itself, is nothing more than a body."
Again, the writing is beautiful, but cynical: "Love does not exist. It has to be invented every time...No one falls in love with anybody. They all fall in love with love." I think there is some parallel here also with the way she thinks about myth: "It is said that all pilgrimage sites look alike." I enjoyed her commentary on how love and myth can be both rich and generic all at once.
If you have read Soluble Fish by Andre Breton, this book will make perfect sense to you, and she even sneaks some references to it, when she mentions "a gigantic fish, half above water half below" (this is a journey into the subconscious, obviously). It relies on the dilations of dreams--the way dreams create duplicates and triplicates, can incorporate multiple viewpoints, can locate a narrator in two places at once, can bring in the fantastic, can be circuitous, can offer us all or none of the answers, can double back on itself.
In content and form, I would say the guiding image of this novel is both the mirror ("Immediately he feels somewhat embarrassed because he has seen himself, as if from the table opposite, as the man who talks to himself at the table in the corner.") and the maze (in the form of floating islands of multiple stories formatted in long strips of prose, alongside quotes about islands from other novels). This novel also reminds me of the cento, the literary technique of cutting and pasting portions of other books to create a new one, a common practice up through the 18th century.
Mists, fogs, nimbuses, dewdrops, and clouds are recurring images, beckoning fantasy, reverie, the porous nature of reality and daydream, and the mystery of creation.
I think Campos can be quite cynical, as in this unspooling, surrealistic narrative, lovers continuously invent and replace each other. They are also often described as actors and the environment of the island as a set piece in a play that keeps occurring over and over. She even says: "Love is a matter of skins. Skins that attract each other, and skins that repel each other. It does not believe in grand passions, in fatal attractions, in lifetime ties." This quote in particular makes me wonder if we are all just masks loving masks. Ditto the title: Eurydice is certainly the perfect myth to bring in when it comes to voyeurism, as lovers in this novel bask in the pleasure of seeing and being seen.
It seems that for Campos, it is the aura of love that is important to us, the secretions of fantasy that congeal around our lovers:
"While walking along the strand she has had the impression of being watched. Her body secretes something gentle and sweet. The gaze touches her and wraps her in a gelatinous substance, in amber still uncongealed...A body, left to itself, is nothing more than a body."
Again, the writing is beautiful, but cynical: "Love does not exist. It has to be invented every time...No one falls in love with anybody. They all fall in love with love." I think there is some parallel here also with the way she thinks about myth: "It is said that all pilgrimage sites look alike." I enjoyed her commentary on how love and myth can be both rich and generic all at once.
If you have read Soluble Fish by Andre Breton, this book will make perfect sense to you, and she even sneaks some references to it, when she mentions "a gigantic fish, half above water half below" (this is a journey into the subconscious, obviously). It relies on the dilations of dreams--the way dreams create duplicates and triplicates, can incorporate multiple viewpoints, can locate a narrator in two places at once, can bring in the fantastic, can be circuitous, can offer us all or none of the answers, can double back on itself.
In content and form, I would say the guiding image of this novel is both the mirror ("Immediately he feels somewhat embarrassed because he has seen himself, as if from the table opposite, as the man who talks to himself at the table in the corner.") and the maze (in the form of floating islands of multiple stories formatted in long strips of prose, alongside quotes about islands from other novels). This novel also reminds me of the cento, the literary technique of cutting and pasting portions of other books to create a new one, a common practice up through the 18th century.
Mists, fogs, nimbuses, dewdrops, and clouds are recurring images, beckoning fantasy, reverie, the porous nature of reality and daydream, and the mystery of creation.
March 14, 2023
Me sorprende lo poco que se habla de esta novela, tan cuidadosamente construida en el lenguaje y forma.
Read
March 12, 2024Necesito tiempo para masticar este libro y tener una opinión. Sin embargo, es un libro que te lleva en un viaje sin paradas. No tiene capítulos y los tópicos y descripciones se mezclan hasta el punto que es complicado saber con certeza el rumbo de la narración. Estoy mareada.
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