La parte recordada

Trilogía las partes #3

by Rodrigo Fresán

¿Cómo recuerda un escritor?

La parte recordada es el tercer y último volumen de la trilogía de Rodrigo Fresán, una obra clave en la literatura en español de nuestro tiempo.

Y cómo recuerda este Escritor que alguna vez fue un prometedor Nextcritor y ahora es apenas un Excritor. Alguien que ya no puede escribir, pero que tampoco puede dejar de leerse y de releerse y de evocar cómo fue alguna vez y cómo ya nunca será. Alguien pensando en que "Inventar era recordar hacia delante. Soñar era recordar hacia arriba o hacia abajo. Recordar era inventar hacia atrás".

Y aquí vienen de nuevo un juguete a cuerda marcha atrás y el fantasma de la electricidad; la encumbrada y borrascosa Penélope y su hijo perdido, 2001: A Space Odyssey y Blade Runner; el ausente Pertusato, Nicolasito y el ubicuo IKEA; la muerta Colma y la fallecida Zzyzx y la difunta Nothing y la inmortal Canciones Tristes; el irrealista Vladimir Nabokov y la surrealista familia Karma; Wish You Were Here sonando en teléfonos (in)movil(izantes) y la invitación a que entre Drácula; el perturbado Tío Hey Walrus y una pareja de padres modelos pero poco modélicos; The Beatles y The Beatles; un inexistente país de origen y una ciudad en llamas; una noche inolvidable que se querría reescribir; y tantas otras partículas aceleradas y fragmentos sueltos y células interconectadas en busca de una trama que los contenga y les de orden y sentido.

Con La parte recordada, Rodrigo Fresán cierra el tríptico cuyo tema son las tres partes que intervienen en la redacción de las vidas ficticias y en la narración de las obras reales. Partes que determinan el modo en que funciona la cabeza de un creador que ya no cree en casi nada salvo en aquellas historias en las que se aconseja tener muy presente al pasado, porque de ello depende el futuro. Esas historias a no olvidar nunca pero acordándose todo el tiempo de que lo que cuentan estará siempre -voluntaria o involuntariamente- modificado por quien las recuerda después de inventar y de soñar, aquí y allá y en todas partes.

Genres: Fiction, 21st Century

752 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2019

About the author

Rodrigo Fresán nació en Buenos Aires en 1963 y vive en Barcelona desde 1999. Es autor de los libros Historia argentina, Vidas de santos, Trabajos manuales, Esperanto, La velocidad de las cosas, Mantra, Jardines de Kensington, El fondo del cielo y La parte inventada.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Remembered Part… A book about books… A book of ideas… What is remembered and what is forgotten… Remembering and forgetting…

Up and down.
But both parts as part of the same action: like the two movements, entry and exit and ascent and descent. Like when you breathe and hold your breath and sink under water again. And it stays there until it loses all notion of space and time. And there it remains until it can no longer be held, but knowing that it must ascend slowly and carefully towards the surface to avoid the bubbling of the blood and the boiling of the neurons.

Rodrigo Fresánrecollects the books of his favourite writers: Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Saul Bellow, Marcel Proust, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., James Joyce… He contemplates movies and rock music… Mass media… Pop culture… Cult culture…

And he wonders if Freud even patented something called the Ulysses complex. Something that could be defined as the compulsion to turn even the shortest trip into a long odyssey. Not free and associative and expansive self-fiction but concentrated and turbulent airplane-fiction. Yes, what for Proust had been that final party at the Guermantes’ Parisian mansion-hotel, for him it was this last plane that contained all subsequent planes and destinations and that It already foreshadowed what was to come and where to go.

To remember the books and to remember the past are two different things. If you forget the book you may always pick it up and refresh your memory… And the forgotten past is forgotten irretrievably… Our memory idealizes and adorns the past… Our memory is fragmentary – we never remember the whole – we remember only fragments…

Fragments listed and enlisted and complete in themselves and sometime, for him, possible and immediate epigraphs.
The fragments that were not even suspected parts of a future collage.
The fragments from which inventions and dreams and memories were nourished; all speaking the sinuous language of the elliptical and not the linear.
The fragments that were the conductive language without insulation in which the great sacred and religious texts were written.

To remember and to forget are two sides of memory – two sides of a single coin.

[Kevin Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a truly gorgeous end to one of the best trilogies I’ve ever read. Ever. No joking around here. It’s a remarkable achievement and I’ve never had so much fun in my life reading books. Each and every book in the “part” trilogy is a love letter to literature. It’s about families. And love. And memory. And writing. And books. And books. And books. The list of references alone would be pages long. From Fitzgerald to Wuthering Heights to Saul Bellow. Fresan’s knowledge of literature is astounding. His love of books is incredible. It’s addictive and fun. It’s erudite and funny.

This book really hit home for me. As someone who is working through recovery from cancer, I’ve been having what my docs have described as “chemo brain,” I don’t use that term lightly. They’ve said that. I forget names and faces sometimes. Nothing too worrisome just yet but it’s there. I don’t ever want to get worse. I have a wife. Kids. Families and friends. And lots of lots of memories of books. From Stephen King to William Gaddis. And I don’t ever want to forget anything or anyone. The Remembered Part is a beautiful rendering of an author’s account of his life. And it’s a remarkable end to a remarkable trilogy. If you need 3 books in your life, these are it. Enjoy it as much as I have.

[jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

for them—all those amnesiacs, asleep and sleepwalking—he daydreamed of alarm-clock books, books that would give them back the ability to dream and to invent and to remember. all those zombies with such short attention spans (a couple hundred seconds, a couple hundred characters), no longer hungry for brains but voided of brain activity, hypnotized by books that offered the ease of reading as their only virtue.

the concluding volume of his inimitable part trilogy (trilogía las partes)—his boundlessly entertaining mr. triptych—the remembered part (la parte recordada) finds rodrigo fresán bringing to a close the story of the writer. in his final foray into this unforgettable world of referential mania and authorial acrobatics, fresán wraps up his epic tale in fantastic fashion. with a genius-level free association of ideas and a preternatural ability to unearth connections between otherwise seemingly disparate subjects, fresán’s writing is simply stunning to behold (both in form and function).

a book about the impossibility of writing that, nevertheless, couldn’t stop being written.
a book that would be the book with the most writing on the subject of not being able to write.
a book that, in practice, would contain its theory and whose plot would reside in its style.
a book whose main character would be none other than the language the book spoke (one language but with linguistic variations and rhythms and phrases that distinguished what was invented and what was dreamed and what was remembered).

as with the best translated book award-winning the invented part and the dreamed part before it, the remembered part explores excavates examines exhumes excogitates the nature of writing (and not writing), of reading (and not reading well), of imagination, creativity, interiority, reality, and, of course, invention, dreaming, and memory. alighting freshly on themes of books, of fragments, of collage, of deserts and ghosts and parentheses, of wind and readers, of autofiction, of immobilizing phones, social media, and other assorted phonies and façades, the remembered part is a reckoning and reconstitution (of collided particulates). all your fan favorites are back as the exwriterly narrator holds court on his past, his present, his proseful prestidigitations, along with post-its and pink floyd, the beatles, bellow, blade runner 2049 and nabokov, 2001: a space odyssey, glenn gould, and dracula, f. scott, wuthering heights, and london (jack not union jack).

again, the sacra/mental and monomythic trinity, yes: to invent and to dream and to remember as the three parts that also intervened—like those meddlesome fairy godmothers or wicked stepmothers—in fictional lives and real works of art. in those stories that warned you to never forget that everything told therein would always be voluntarily or involuntarily modified by the teller. and that then it would be modified again by the one the stories were told to. and, finally, that all of that would be more or less hidden from both by the living dead who reside in each and every story or by one who was born dead and lived to tell them.

across the nearly 1,900 pages that compose the collective masterwork that is these three books, fresán has made and unmade and remade a world in/of/adjacent to our own. perfecting the art of the tangential and discursive, fresán (re)imagines, reflects, and refines the novel in spite of our attention span-atrophied age of inattention. the part trilogy's magnificence is many-splendored, like a trillion crazy diamonds shining as a single sun above the bottom of the sky.

tripartite brilliance: somebody wrote and i went into a dream.

literature like that vampire who demands your blood so that later, if you're worthy, he can return it to your lips from a slash in his own chest. and in that way—with any luck and any justice—attain immortality. and to be able to transform yourself into anything. being able to cross any threshold knowing that some part of you will stay there, inside the book, for all eternity, for as long as you keep telling that story that now, through the simple act and complex science of having read it, was also your own story.

*will vanderhyden's translation of all three books in fresán's part trilogy is nothing short of remarkable, a staggeringly impressive feat of patience, fortitude, and bilingual dexterity.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

After The Invented Part & The Dreamed Part we now have the final part of this mammoth trilogy. After enjoying the 1st part I found part 2 a bit of a slog and was worried this (the longest of the three books) would also try my patience. However it didn't turn out to be so difficult after all. I'm not sure if everyone else would feel the same way since many of Fresan's references were also some of my personal favourites (2001: A Space Odyssey, Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here etc)

Don't expect much in the way of a plot, just go with the flow.

[ReemK10 (Paper Pills) · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're a writer who likes to read or a reader that likes to write, this is the book for you! Rodrigo Fresán speaks our language.

Obeying the one true commandment:
Caress the detail, the divine detail.

1. https://www.instagram.com/reel/C-WYn2...

2. https://www.instagram.com/reel/C_OYIz...

3. https://www.instagram.com/reel/C_OYvx...

Plus, I just loved those Karmas!

[Michael Kuehn · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, the final page in that book you've been reading has just been turned, the cover closed, and before your rational brain dissects the novel into its components, before literary analysis turns this joyful fleeting moment of narrative climax into an academic exercise, you feel something. You have an experience, an indescribable lingering emotional reaction to the book. Joy, intense satisfaction, a realization of a profound and sublime encounter with genius. And yet, being unable to wrap your mind around the entirety of what you just experienced. It's blurry, out of focus, yet there is a sense of excitement and fulfillment.

I don't know how else to describe it.

That intuitive something for me upon completion of Fresan's trilogy was not unlike what I felt upon completion of Proust's masterpiece. Or of any other of my most deeply felt novels, THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, MICKELSSON'S GHOSTS, FINNEGANS WAKE, or MRS DALLOWAY. Waking from a rapturous dream on a high you cannot describe.

What I've had to say about this incredible trilogy I've already said in my comments for 'THE INVENTED PART' and 'THE DREAMED PART.' This, the final installment, truly defies description: There's brilliance to be found on every page, a masterpiece, inexhaustible joy, wisdom, and humor.

Since I was very young I've experienced moments of these aesthetic chills – oftentimes accompanied by those hair-raising goosebumps – when listening to certain music; it could be Beethoven's Ninth or Iron Maiden's 'Trooper', an automatic frisson which overtakes me. The release of dopamine and serotonin, brain chemicals associated with happiness, so say the scientists interested in such things. I cannot help but feel that something akin to this neurological blessing is at work when I close the book on a special novel.

Fresan's trilogy provided three very special reading experiences. Simply incredible.

[od1_40reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

“How to go on–now that everything that has to happen has happened–and come to the end; the end being, he remembers now, all that’s left to come to pass, the last thing to become present and future.
Or better:
How to come to the end–now that everything that had to happen has happened–when you cannot go on?
How to stop and think that there’s nothing else out there for you?
Nothing left to live or to say or to write or the read or to invent, but, even still, dreaming that everything he has left to remember is impossible to forget; and yet, to tell the truth, there’s nothing he wants more than to be able to forget it all.”

And so it’s done… ‘The Parts’ trilogy is complete. We have invented, dreamed, and remembered.

These books have been nothing short of marvellous, and so of course I’m somewhat sad to have reached the end. But it’s certainly not over …

All three books are so richly ladened up with references, quotes, excerpts, concepts, ideas, opinions of and on all sorts of aspects of modern life, culture, literature, music, film and the arts that there is so much to return to and reread. And rereading is a big theme in this final edition – Fresán quotes Nabokov on the subject: “One cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”

At the crux of these books is how we create–we invent, we dream and we remember. The trilogy’s protagonist, The Writer, says:

“Everything that had occurred in his books when someone read them had happened first when it occurred to him, the writer. And he’d never come up with a better origin or destination than that.
Even then he already intuited traversing the expansive surface between one extreme and the other–the life and the plot–would be like crossing a desert in the wind. Like a coming and going, like a part to be invented and part to be dreamed and a part to be remembered.

To invent was to remember looking ahead.

To dream was to remember looking up or to invent looking down.

To remember was to invent looking back.”

Anyone who has made it this far in the trilogy will surely agree that it’s impossible to sum up these books in a few words on GoodReads; but I will say that Fresán really has stored up his best deck of cards for the final show. I also don’t want to spoil anything for those that are reading, with every intention of making it to the end. But I will say that there are answers lying ahead, and there are plenty of tie-ins to the other two volumes. Fresán does a great job of bringing everything together.

As with both the other two volumes, writers and their novels feature heavily, particularly Nabokov in this final part. As I’ve said in previous posts about this trilogy, Fresán’s books are for readers (and rereaders), and everyone with an unhealthy interest in writers and literature. And, also music of a certain era… The Beatles and Pink Floyd once again make several appearances, particularly ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Wish You Where Here’.

[Braden Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dear Rodrigo,

How nice it is to meet someone else with a self-diagnosis of “Combray Syndrome!” I, too, became at one point in my life obsessed with Proust and Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory.” I, too, cannot help but linger on impressions from my childhood. All the more since having children of my own. I will admit I had no shortage of doubts about your final triptych installation, seeing as by the end of “The Dreamed Part” I felt nauseated by what I experienced as a whining maximalist book for Luddite-leaning boomers. Ha! Sure enough, you spare no blows at all the populist young writers today, and yes I rolled my eyes at you the way I used to at my grandfather when he was alive, the same way every generation does at that which precedes it. Yet, by the end, after all your lists and tangential alibis, I was struck by what you were trying to do. And yes, it reminds me of what all great maximalists attempt to do: to say everything until silence is all that remains, uttering again and again as a means to approach the unutterable.

In religious studies we used to call this the cataphatic way, which necessarily always finds itself at an apophatic end. And, in effect, what you have achieved is nothing less than a mountain of references, texts, films, albums, philosophers, art pieces, all that stand so high and tall so that no one will see the edifice has always been one made of sliding mud, all of which sinks into a bog of pain, trauma, the “unforgettable part” as you do brilliantly put it.

And how true it is to say that we reinvent ourselves in our memories and that we use our dreams to invent our pasts, that all these faculties temporally collide into a messy sense of self. And here you are, making yourself into a proper Billy Pilgrim, constructing the ultimate inter-textual coping mechanism. Derrida and Lacan would have a hissy fit!

Anyway, that’s all folks, and thank you to those who encouraged me to keep reading until the end!

-Braden

[Anthony Crupi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fresán slips a cosmic joke past the goalie with the subhead "THE FINE ART OF LEAVING SOMETHING OUT," which appears on page 581 of this volume—or page 1,678 of the triptych.

[fwiw, the copyeditor must've grown weary of the undertaking and wandered off; the published text is positively awash with typographical errors/omissions/elisions/orthographic boo-boos/fuckups of all stripes]

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first book was a masterpiece, the second quite good, but by the third I think Fresán just ran out of steam. The elements that irked me in The Invented Part - the bitchy Boomer censure of smartphones and ebooks; the assertion that real writer is a book hoarder whose works don't align with public taste; women as muses but rarely authors themselves (outside the narrator's Ophelia-esque dead sister) - but nevertheless worked as characterization of a literary curmudgeon who knows he's out of touch are just tiresome here. The unnamed narrator comes across as pretentiously narrow-minded (in addition to the above, all the authors, musicians, and filmmakers he admires and references are white men), and it's hard to tell if that's an intentional character flaw or not because this trilogy as a whole has the feeling of being a fictionalized manifesto on People These Days Too PHONE.

Also, an aside: Marie Kondo never said you shouldn't own more than thirty books. She said that is her own personal limit. She has explained repeatedly that Konmari is not minimalism and that it is not one-size-fits-all. If you own 50 coffee mugs and you only actually use two but they all spark joy then Konmari says to keep them. The dedication of self-proclaimed "bookworms" and "voracious readers" to misunderstanding her is quite ironic considering she has written bestselling books on her method.

[Darío Luque Martínez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cuanto menos, inusual. Culminación de una trilogía que oscila entre la novela de autoficción y el ensayo. El estilo de Fresán, tan rizómatico, selecciona una serie de ideas y temas que se repiten, desapareciendo y reapareciendo, a lo largo de setecientas páginas. Ideas tan dispares como el viaje, la obra de Vladimir Nabokov, los Beatles, la autorreferencialidad, la memoria, 'Tender is the night' de Fitzgerald, y muchas otras que vienen y van. Una escritura con apariencia de impulsiva y desordenada, pero construido con bajo un riguroso plan insuperable. No es para lectores con facilidad para aburrirse; puede leerse como unos elogiables ejercicios de estilo.

[Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

"And because he wanted his books to be of the take-no- prisoners variety: not capturing anyone and definitely not setting anyone free, forcing all comers to read them point-blank and as if they were in flames."

I will miss the experience of reading this book. Dense and digressive, it's the kind of book that is an experience more than it is a plot.

A book that I enjoyed that I don't think I will ever recommend. I might read it again someday though.

[Derek · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF. Throwing in the towel at page 125. I liked the first two books in the trilogy, but maybe attempting to read all of them within half a year is too much. I thought Fresán was treading water here and very curmudgeonly. Not much enjoyable here for me to grab on to. And given my slow reading pace I could not stomach another month trudging through this.

I might try again in the (not too near) future. But right now I need a long break from Fresán.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this a lot, even with all the typos.