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La casa de cartón
«Mi primer amor tenía doce años y las uñas negras. Mi alma rusa de entonces, en aquel pueblecito de once mil almas y cura publicista, amparó la soledad de la muchacha más fea con un amor grave, social, sombrío, que era como una penumbra de sesión de congreso internacional obrero. Ella me decía, al ponerse en sexo: "Eres un socialista". Y su almita de educanda de monjas europeas se abría como un devocionario íntimo por la parte que trata del pecado mortal».
La casa de cartón es la piedra fundacional de la vanguardia peruana, en varios sentidos, pero también era una despedida de estructuras coloniales, tanto en la forma como en el tema. La visión de unos días en el balneario de Barranco, con un tono entre decadentista y onírico, con un lenguaje entre visionario y dannunziano, recorre estas páginas tocadas por la gracia.
del prólogo de Vicente Luis Mora.
La casa de cartón es una novela breve, escrita en prosa lírica que se ha convertido en un clásico de las letras peruanas. El relato es sustancialmente diferente a todo lo que se había hecho en prosa en el Perú hasta ese momento. Una pequeña obra maestra de ironía, finura de observación e invención verbal. Narra las experiencias de un adolescente, durante un verano en el balneario de Barranco. Casi carente de trama narrativa, el libro está formado más que nada por las descripciones que este adolescente realiza, en su paseo diario, de las casas, las calles y los habitantes del balneario.
La casa de cartón es la piedra fundacional de la vanguardia peruana, en varios sentidos, pero también era una despedida de estructuras coloniales, tanto en la forma como en el tema. La visión de unos días en el balneario de Barranco, con un tono entre decadentista y onírico, con un lenguaje entre visionario y dannunziano, recorre estas páginas tocadas por la gracia.
del prólogo de Vicente Luis Mora.
La casa de cartón es una novela breve, escrita en prosa lírica que se ha convertido en un clásico de las letras peruanas. El relato es sustancialmente diferente a todo lo que se había hecho en prosa en el Perú hasta ese momento. Una pequeña obra maestra de ironía, finura de observación e invención verbal. Narra las experiencias de un adolescente, durante un verano en el balneario de Barranco. Casi carente de trama narrativa, el libro está formado más que nada por las descripciones que este adolescente realiza, en su paseo diario, de las casas, las calles y los habitantes del balneario.
120 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1928
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About the author
Martín Adán
26 books22 followersMartín Adán, pseudonym of Rafael de la Fuente Benavides, was a Peruvian poet whose body of work is notable for its hermeticism and metaphysical depth.
Martín Adan's first book was the novel La casa de cartón (The Cardboard House). Published in 1928 when the author was only 20 years old, The Cardboard House was influenced by the Avant-garde and is one of the best examples of Peruvian narrative of its time. The novel was told through the paintings of a young man's experiences and reflections and was notable for evoking the district of Lima, Barranco. The Cardboard House's innovative theme and structure can, in some ways, be considered precursorial to novels of the literary boom in Latin America.
The remainder of Adán's work was poetry. It stands out for a profundity of philosophical reflection, that sinks into the mysteries of what is eternal and transcendent. His poetry incorporates a series of images and hermetic, symbolic metaphors (among them, notably, the rose). Adán's poetry mixes novel uses of language with traditional poetic forms like the sonnet. Reality and identity are also common themes in his poetry.
With his body of poetry, Adán tried to achieve a "creación total" (total creation) through "la poesía absoluta" (absolute poetry) and affirm the divine power and omnipotence of the poet who creates realities.
Martín Adan's first book was the novel La casa de cartón (The Cardboard House). Published in 1928 when the author was only 20 years old, The Cardboard House was influenced by the Avant-garde and is one of the best examples of Peruvian narrative of its time. The novel was told through the paintings of a young man's experiences and reflections and was notable for evoking the district of Lima, Barranco. The Cardboard House's innovative theme and structure can, in some ways, be considered precursorial to novels of the literary boom in Latin America.
The remainder of Adán's work was poetry. It stands out for a profundity of philosophical reflection, that sinks into the mysteries of what is eternal and transcendent. His poetry incorporates a series of images and hermetic, symbolic metaphors (among them, notably, the rose). Adán's poetry mixes novel uses of language with traditional poetic forms like the sonnet. Reality and identity are also common themes in his poetry.
With his body of poetry, Adán tried to achieve a "creación total" (total creation) through "la poesía absoluta" (absolute poetry) and affirm the divine power and omnipotence of the poet who creates realities.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 74 reviews
July 22, 2020
The Cardboard House is a gallery of exquisite vignettes that are as colourful and bright as the talented impressionist’s miniatures of the world, of himself, of human beings, of love…
Every vignette is a flowery, often extravagant embroidery created out of the vivid poetic images.
Every vignette is an iridescent tessera and all those brilliant pieces add up to a fantastically beautiful mosaic.
In the strange way Martín Adán even augured his tenebrous future: “Life is not a river that flows: life is a puddle that stagnates.”
Beyond the fields: the sierra; before the fields: a creek lined with alder trees and women washing clothes and children, all the same color of indifferent dirt. It is two o’clock in the afternoon. The sun struggles to free its rays from the branches into which it has fallen captive. The sun — a rare, hard, golden, lanky coleopteran.
Every vignette is a flowery, often extravagant embroidery created out of the vivid poetic images.
In the bewitched mirror of the rainy street — a drop of milk, the streetlamp’s iridescent globe; a drop of water, the sky above; a drop of blood, one’s self with this foolish joy at winter’s unannounced arrival… I am now that man with no age or race who appears in geography monographs, with ridiculous clothes, a somber face, his arms spread wide as he arranges India ink pastures and charcoal clouds — the engraving’s sparse, ragged landscape.
Every vignette is an iridescent tessera and all those brilliant pieces add up to a fantastically beautiful mosaic.
A nighttime stroll. We have found a street hidden from the sky by dense, serious foliage. Now the sky does not exist; it has been rolled up like a rug, leaving barren the floorboards of space where the worlds walk, high society, slowly, silently, fastidiously. Now I love you as I have never loved you — truly, painfully. I don’t know how… Walking through the street that returns our footsteps and our voices to us as in a cavern…
In the strange way Martín Adán even augured his tenebrous future: “Life is not a river that flows: life is a puddle that stagnates.”
October 12, 2017
Adán's words work like memory: not a long and spooling high-def replaying of people and events, but razor sharp fragments that can injure if mishandled.
The sea is a soul we once had, that we cannot find, that we barely remembered as our own, a soul that is always different along every esplanade.
This book is a proem, a masterful use of language that tells a story that isn't a story. It is un-put-down-able. It can be devoured in a sitting. But it has the heuristic timbre of a millennium old devotional that is intended for daily ingestion: a single section to be read silently on one's knees at sunrise, recited to the wind at noon and sung as an aria to the stars in the evening.
Your star is nothing but a star that no doubt views things as you do, and its flickering is nothing but fatigue at having to look in a way that has nothing to do with its feelings.
What 18 year-old writes like that? Not just one sentence, but hundreds and hundreds like it? At 18 I had the high score on Q*bert at DJ's Pizza in Kingwood, Texas. I had that going for me.
Because one's own life is a puddle, but the lives of others are faces that come to look at themselves in it.
The sea is a soul we once had, that we cannot find, that we barely remembered as our own, a soul that is always different along every esplanade.
This book is a proem, a masterful use of language that tells a story that isn't a story. It is un-put-down-able. It can be devoured in a sitting. But it has the heuristic timbre of a millennium old devotional that is intended for daily ingestion: a single section to be read silently on one's knees at sunrise, recited to the wind at noon and sung as an aria to the stars in the evening.
Your star is nothing but a star that no doubt views things as you do, and its flickering is nothing but fatigue at having to look in a way that has nothing to do with its feelings.
What 18 year-old writes like that? Not just one sentence, but hundreds and hundreds like it? At 18 I had the high score on Q*bert at DJ's Pizza in Kingwood, Texas. I had that going for me.
Because one's own life is a puddle, but the lives of others are faces that come to look at themselves in it.
August 20, 2022
For those curious about Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva or Viscount Lascano Tegui’s On Elegance While Sleeping, get this instead; I wish I did. Instead, sheer luck ordained that I’d stumble across it at my new local library – a tiny clapboard place near the beach in a sleepy town that's hardly the Barranco but isn't too dissimilar – only a week or so after Mike Puma's review. What is it? A kind of prose-poem, or a series of them, or a prose-piece made of fragments that often ascend to poetry. At times it’s like the physical descriptions from The Book of Disquiet without the Soaresian philosophy. At times it’s near indecipherable, like Agua Viva but less grandiose. At times, like On Elegance While Sleeping, it’s the everyday outpourings of a perceptive youth, funny, random-seeming, but unlike Tegui never flippant or glib. What does it ‘mean’? Apparently Adan said he’d written it to practice the rules his grammar professor gave him, and while at times I doubted the wisdom behind it I never found it callow or vainglorious (which, for the work of a man of twenty so indifferent to novelistic tradition, is impressive). In the back-cover blurb Vargas Llosa calls it ‘profoundly realist’, and in a way I agree. It’s as if the young Adan took to wandering with a notebook, taking it out to note the interplay of his thoughts with the places he discovered, and the interplay of the act of writing with those thoughts and places too. Even his metaphors seem to come direct from whatever surrounds him as he writes:
Who knows why this book gives me pleasure? For a while I felt repulsed by these novels-without-plots; none of them, I felt, came close to Pessoa. But there’s something in this one – the freedom, the way of seeing – that cheers me despite the occasionally too-jarring angularity or self-indulgence of the writing. Contrast it with Agua Viva:
And I think I see the problem: Lispector describes what Adan does. There is no manifesto in Adan, or if so it’s hidden. His is a natural and spontaneous outpouring. Deeply-felt it may or may not be, but it’s real. Not – like the Viscount Tegui (whose book, in its repulsive Dalkey edition, irritates me just to look at it), or the earnest Lispector – a piece of theatre.
Why make these contrasts? Maybe because I’ve been looking for something like this and not knowing it, and had despaired of finding it. Only now do I notice a similarity in the cover-blurbs of Tegui and Lispector: ‘A hidden genius of Argentine literature,’ says Le Monde of Tegui; ‘One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century,’ says Colm Toibin of Lispector. Sure, we all want to uncover those ‘hidden geniuses’, and on the strength of The Cardboard House I can’t definitely say Adan qualifies. But boy, he has potential. Six poetry collections were published by this notorious recluse in his lifetime – treasures waiting to be discovered?
Anyone who wants to do a two-for-one swap get in touch. This is a book I’d like to have with me to turn back to.
Oh, and just to be clear, I love Lispector, just not Agua Viva.
My life is a hole dug with the hands of a truant child in the sands of a beach – a malignant and tiny hole that distorts the reflections of gentlemen who scold truant children, the image of respectable gentlemen who come to the beach and infest the sea air – so clean, so brilliant – with their horrible office odours. Such is my life... – a little puddle on the beach – so now you see why I cannot be sad. The high tide undoes me, but another truant child digs me again at the other end of the beach, and I cease to exist for a few days, during which time I learn, always anew, the joy of not existing and the joy of resuscitating.
Who knows why this book gives me pleasure? For a while I felt repulsed by these novels-without-plots; none of them, I felt, came close to Pessoa. But there’s something in this one – the freedom, the way of seeing – that cheers me despite the occasionally too-jarring angularity or self-indulgence of the writing. Contrast it with Agua Viva:
I struggle to conquer more deeply my freedom of sensations and thoughts, without any utilitarian meaning: I am alone, I and my freedom.
And I think I see the problem: Lispector describes what Adan does. There is no manifesto in Adan, or if so it’s hidden. His is a natural and spontaneous outpouring. Deeply-felt it may or may not be, but it’s real. Not – like the Viscount Tegui (whose book, in its repulsive Dalkey edition, irritates me just to look at it), or the earnest Lispector – a piece of theatre.
Why make these contrasts? Maybe because I’ve been looking for something like this and not knowing it, and had despaired of finding it. Only now do I notice a similarity in the cover-blurbs of Tegui and Lispector: ‘A hidden genius of Argentine literature,’ says Le Monde of Tegui; ‘One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century,’ says Colm Toibin of Lispector. Sure, we all want to uncover those ‘hidden geniuses’, and on the strength of The Cardboard House I can’t definitely say Adan qualifies. But boy, he has potential. Six poetry collections were published by this notorious recluse in his lifetime – treasures waiting to be discovered?
Anyone who wants to do a two-for-one swap get in touch. This is a book I’d like to have with me to turn back to.
Oh, and just to be clear, I love Lispector, just not Agua Viva.
October 8, 2012
the only prose work from martín adán, the cardboard house (la casa de cartón) was originally published in 1928 when the peruvian poet was twenty years young. set in the barranco district of lima, the cardboard house came to be an influential work preceding the latin american boom. nearly plotless, the story follows a young narrator around the city's resort area as he makes fragmentary observations about the intriguing sights and individuals he encounters along his way. with rich, descriptive, and melodious prose, the cardboard house is a thoughtful and beautifully-written work. sadly, it appears that none of adán's collections of poetry have ever been translated into english.
graywolf press first published the cardboard house in a slightly different translation in 1990, but it quickly went out of print. in this new edition, katherine silver (aira, sada, castellanos moya, et al.) revisited her previous translation, updating it with minor revisions, an uncovered fragment omitted from the original book, and an accompanying autobiographical poem ("written blindly") composed in reply to correspondence seeking information about the poet and his life.
graywolf press first published the cardboard house in a slightly different translation in 1990, but it quickly went out of print. in this new edition, katherine silver (aira, sada, castellanos moya, et al.) revisited her previous translation, updating it with minor revisions, an uncovered fragment omitted from the original book, and an accompanying autobiographical poem ("written blindly") composed in reply to correspondence seeking information about the poet and his life.
in the bewitched mirror of the rainy street- a drop of milk, the streetlamp's iridescent globe; a drop of water, the sky above; a drop of blood, one's self with this foolish joy at winter's unannounced arrival...
July 7, 2020
Review to come.
August 2, 2013
A remarkable "first book" written by an eighteen year-old kid. I have trouble believing he did not have help either with the original publisher or translator of the time. The distinguished and mature sophistication exhibited was unbelievable for a kid that age and my bull-shit radar was smoking from being over-worked. Nonetheless, credit is due this beautiful work. Reading like a long prose poem the images were dreamlike and lyrical, however there was no character or event I ever connected with. There was plenty of place (setting) in the poem and its raw beauty was stupendous.
Hannah Alpert-Abrams has written a review of the novel which can be found here:
http://www.full-stop.net/2012/11/21/r...
It is possible I shan't have much more to say on the matter other than this rating above and my previous reading progress reports.
Hannah Alpert-Abrams has written a review of the novel which can be found here:
http://www.full-stop.net/2012/11/21/r...
It is possible I shan't have much more to say on the matter other than this rating above and my previous reading progress reports.
December 29, 2013
This is outstanding. Every sentence combines words in ways we never employ in daily life, but make imaginative sense here. Adan describes his world, in the Barranco suburb of Lima in the 1920s. Surreal, essential, wild, bitter, erotic, youthful--a wonderful book.
March 10, 2021
Me resulta difícil hablar de este librito, pero sé que me gustó. Lo leí en dos veces; no es que se lee rápido pero hay algo que te lleva por las palabras, hay algo del ritmo que no te deja pensar en otra cosa que no sea lo que estás leyendo. No pasa nada, se entiende poco, pero igual se disfruta mucho. Imágenes más que acciones. También importa mucho lo sensorial. Acá algunas cosas que marqué:
"Me he salido la campo a ver nubes y alfalfares. Pero he salido casi a la noche, y ya no podré oler los olores de la tarde, táctiles, que se huelen con la piel".
"Las tardes eran blancas en invierno, y en verano, de un oro rojizo, de un oro creciente que al fin se hacía sol -un sol que llenaba todo el cielo-. Las tardes de invierno eran blancas, de una blancura traspasada y luminosa de cristales de sal, y el sol en ellas era un sol de plata con la circunferencia mellada".
"¿Habrá existido alguna vez aquel hombre? ¿Habremos soñado Ramón y yo? ¿Lo habremos creado Ramón y yo con facciones ajenas, con gestos propios? ¿Nos habrá llevado el aburrimiento a hacer un hombre? ¿Tenía aquel hombre memoria, entendimiento y voluntad?".
"Me he salido la campo a ver nubes y alfalfares. Pero he salido casi a la noche, y ya no podré oler los olores de la tarde, táctiles, que se huelen con la piel".
"Las tardes eran blancas en invierno, y en verano, de un oro rojizo, de un oro creciente que al fin se hacía sol -un sol que llenaba todo el cielo-. Las tardes de invierno eran blancas, de una blancura traspasada y luminosa de cristales de sal, y el sol en ellas era un sol de plata con la circunferencia mellada".
"¿Habrá existido alguna vez aquel hombre? ¿Habremos soñado Ramón y yo? ¿Lo habremos creado Ramón y yo con facciones ajenas, con gestos propios? ¿Nos habrá llevado el aburrimiento a hacer un hombre? ¿Tenía aquel hombre memoria, entendimiento y voluntad?".
March 4, 2018
An ice cream vendor’s trumpet drew attention to a nocturnal howling of dogs, symphony of tin and moon, rip-roaring from the beginning, a rip that exposed black, canine palates bristling with taste buds as hard as calluses. If their singing could be musically annotated, it would have to be done on a temperature scale, on graph paper, with a dotted line, with odd numbers. Musical skeleton. Forty-two degrees Fahrenheit: a fatal fever. A whirlwind of light and dust rises to the sun from a nearby field surrounded by thick adobe walls.
Martín Adán (1908 – 1985) was a Peruvian poet who published his only novel, The Cardboard House, when he was twenty years old. The book meanders through page-long vignettes of life in Lima surrounded by sky, sea, and city. Adán’s work in general is described as hermetic, metaphysical, deep, full of symbolic metaphors. That may be so, but from a superficial literary standpoint—were there such a thing—in Cardboard House, he excels at lyrical descriptions of the commonplace seaside scenes.
In particular, Katherine Silver, the translator, renders Adán's prose exquisitely.
This is a book for any connoisseur of the rich poetic image and anyone hoping to polish up their own writing. Adán employs most figures of speech—the ones usually treated as rhetorical tricks—and he does so with such unpretentiousness and nuance we'd all do well to learn from him.
To be savoured and reread.
January 22, 2018
This is one of the books I’ve found only because of Goodreads recommendations while I was reading some South American authors, so thanks Goodreads!
Goodreads recommend it after I’ve read the wonderful Clarice Lispector, and since she’s now one of my all-time favorites, I can’t help but compare these two.
Maybe comparing isn’t really the right word. This book, amazingly, came out in 1928, which is pretty outstanding if you think about its writing style and its insights, while Lispector was mostly known for her books many years after that. So I can’t help to think that perhaps Lispector did actually read it and might have been influenced by it.
Did she? I don’t know. Both use repeating the same word/sentence three times as a syntax trick, which is wonderful, and both are stream of conscious writers, so I guess perhaps Lispector was influenced by him. But that’s not the question, and I like Lispector’s writing better since she is way more surreal.
Still, this is a great book, full of original ideas and I’m grateful for entering the mind of a poet, almost 100 years ago at the other part of the earth, and finding his writing moving and still relevant for today. I’m very disappointed with the fact that this is the one and the only serious book of his, considering his life story, but it’s a great adding to the wonderful league of South American writers, and founding fathers of good Latin literature.
Like many said here before, it’s a collage of memories, scenes and an inner world exploding on the page with originality and sharp insights and metaphors. I also loved the last part of the book very much, with its closing beautiful poem.
If you’re into stream of conscious, this book is for you.
Goodreads recommend it after I’ve read the wonderful Clarice Lispector, and since she’s now one of my all-time favorites, I can’t help but compare these two.
Maybe comparing isn’t really the right word. This book, amazingly, came out in 1928, which is pretty outstanding if you think about its writing style and its insights, while Lispector was mostly known for her books many years after that. So I can’t help to think that perhaps Lispector did actually read it and might have been influenced by it.
Did she? I don’t know. Both use repeating the same word/sentence three times as a syntax trick, which is wonderful, and both are stream of conscious writers, so I guess perhaps Lispector was influenced by him. But that’s not the question, and I like Lispector’s writing better since she is way more surreal.
Still, this is a great book, full of original ideas and I’m grateful for entering the mind of a poet, almost 100 years ago at the other part of the earth, and finding his writing moving and still relevant for today. I’m very disappointed with the fact that this is the one and the only serious book of his, considering his life story, but it’s a great adding to the wonderful league of South American writers, and founding fathers of good Latin literature.
Like many said here before, it’s a collage of memories, scenes and an inner world exploding on the page with originality and sharp insights and metaphors. I also loved the last part of the book very much, with its closing beautiful poem.
If you’re into stream of conscious, this book is for you.
September 14, 2020
The slope of the cliff plunged into fig trees, moist earth, trenches, moss, vines, Japanese pavilions: from top to bottom, from the parish church to the beach. Suddenly, the sinister, rampant road twisted. And riding a covered sled — on one side, light; on the other, a make-believe cavern and an invisible madonna and a miracle of candles that stay lit under drips — it fell onto the platform. [27]
This afternoon, the world is a potato in a sack. The sack is a small, white, dusty sky, like the small sacks used for carrying flour. The world is little, dark, gritty, as if just harvested in some unknown agricultural infinity. I have gone to the countryside to see the clouds and the alfalfa fields. But I have gone almost at night, and I will no longer be able to smell the scents of the afternoon, tactile scents, that are smelled through the skin. [45]
September 9, 2011
No es prosa. No es poesía. Es un manual de cómo hacer origami con el Castellano. Bellísimo.
August 29, 2021
Psychotic and beautiful sparks of a brilliant, adolescent maximalism. With the exception of a sober and morally minded interlude tucked into the center of the book seemingly arbitrarily (called the Underwood Poems) the vignettes are decadently of their own world. But it is the glimpses of moral concern and searching that make what would be a novel and entertaining surrealist exercise in wordplay into a great work of writing.
January 12, 2021
No me gustó. No sé si no estaba en el mood apropiado o qué, pero me aburrí muchísimo. Si reconozco el aporte en su momento y lo novedoso en su estructura, pero, más allá de eso, no encontré nada que me motivara de una u otra manera. De hecho, terminé de leerla más por la presión de tratarse de un clásico de la literatura peruana, pero no me llevó a nada.
July 18, 2023
This is the least rated book that's more than 50 years old that I've managed to find on the shelves of one of my local libraries. It's one of those works that I had to look at and then double back to confirm that, yes, for lord knows what reason, a public institution has considered this worthwhile enough to have on loan to its non-academic audience. Given that beginning, it would have been much more suitable for this story to end in a happy 'newly discovered favorite of mine' flurry of reviewing, but alas. My taste for the experimental is not as bamboozled as it once was, and so if I pick up on certain less than engaging trends that I know were present in other experimental trains of literature of the time (modernism, futurism, etc), I'm not in the mood to doublethink myself into acceptance anymore. Sure, Adán had quite the head for international aristocracies and surface level politics at the tender age of twenty, and a few pages of his more ecological focused pieces describing the Peruvian coastline are something special. However, young overeducated men can be some of the most viciously disdainful beasts alive, and not the prettiest turn of phrase in existence will reconcile me with that.
There's a certain turn of phrase that, however creative it is along certain lines, always trends towards certain prescribed others as dictated by the hierarchy that informs its world. You get the references to other vaunted writers, the drawn out metaphors, the disjointed paragraphs and unclear characterizations, and yet, in the corner, there rests a woman of color acting as cornerstone, touchpoint, integrating everything else through sheer contrast to her invoked abjectness. Sure, ok, it's the late 1920s with a dude barely ensconced within higher education, so it's almost a given that the 'avant garde' is certainly not going to include something that works against the caltrops of gender, race, sexuality, or nationality. But if that's what's required to delve into a linchpin of literature, to turn off everything else save what can admire the fittings on the page and the constellations of namedrops here and there, I find myself more exhausted at the end of these barely 130 pages of composition then I did at the beginning. A working example of this is, I delve into an anthropomorphizing tract, start on the incipience of a scene of rabbits, and finish up on a Jewish stereotype. Predictable, no? To enter into a scene of creativity, and be forced to truck with hatred. In any case, perhaps I'm latching onto a small bit of maladjusted comprehension in the midst of so much uncontextualized translation, much as the human brain is far more likely to remember the scenes of negativity than anything else. All in all, there were a few bits and bobs that carried me to the two stars, but it may be for the best to let this one pass me by without too much more fuss.
So, this long awaited experimental tome in translation didn't go nearly as well as that series of words tends to promise for someone like me. Still, the fact that this copy is stored at a public library bodes well in terms of the overall health of the local community's access to reading that fulfills a diverse range of interests. Sure, this book isn't going to cultivate any anti-racist sorts of tendencies, and I doubt the circulation is convincing any library board members to sign off on all of the funding increases, post haste. Still, the circles of New Directions readers are weird and wandering ones, and for every representative who is a pontificating fool who never should've been let out of academia, there are those who are truly in it for something beyond what they've been told is good for them, aka worship always what turns a profit and treat with art so long as it smooths the networking and fills the corporate coffers. As for me, I might need to step back and do some more nonfictioning before I plunge headfirst into a sector of world and time whose literature I'm barely acknowledging across the room at the local bar. Maybe then I'd have something more to latch onto then the usual culprits.
There's a certain turn of phrase that, however creative it is along certain lines, always trends towards certain prescribed others as dictated by the hierarchy that informs its world. You get the references to other vaunted writers, the drawn out metaphors, the disjointed paragraphs and unclear characterizations, and yet, in the corner, there rests a woman of color acting as cornerstone, touchpoint, integrating everything else through sheer contrast to her invoked abjectness. Sure, ok, it's the late 1920s with a dude barely ensconced within higher education, so it's almost a given that the 'avant garde' is certainly not going to include something that works against the caltrops of gender, race, sexuality, or nationality. But if that's what's required to delve into a linchpin of literature, to turn off everything else save what can admire the fittings on the page and the constellations of namedrops here and there, I find myself more exhausted at the end of these barely 130 pages of composition then I did at the beginning. A working example of this is, I delve into an anthropomorphizing tract, start on the incipience of a scene of rabbits, and finish up on a Jewish stereotype. Predictable, no? To enter into a scene of creativity, and be forced to truck with hatred. In any case, perhaps I'm latching onto a small bit of maladjusted comprehension in the midst of so much uncontextualized translation, much as the human brain is far more likely to remember the scenes of negativity than anything else. All in all, there were a few bits and bobs that carried me to the two stars, but it may be for the best to let this one pass me by without too much more fuss.
So, this long awaited experimental tome in translation didn't go nearly as well as that series of words tends to promise for someone like me. Still, the fact that this copy is stored at a public library bodes well in terms of the overall health of the local community's access to reading that fulfills a diverse range of interests. Sure, this book isn't going to cultivate any anti-racist sorts of tendencies, and I doubt the circulation is convincing any library board members to sign off on all of the funding increases, post haste. Still, the circles of New Directions readers are weird and wandering ones, and for every representative who is a pontificating fool who never should've been let out of academia, there are those who are truly in it for something beyond what they've been told is good for them, aka worship always what turns a profit and treat with art so long as it smooths the networking and fills the corporate coffers. As for me, I might need to step back and do some more nonfictioning before I plunge headfirst into a sector of world and time whose literature I'm barely acknowledging across the room at the local bar. Maybe then I'd have something more to latch onto then the usual culprits.
January 22, 2022
Vestite para escribir, Martín Adán
November 6, 2013
Just because something reads like poetry doesn't necessarily make it a good ride. This translation felt sterile to me. The language was nice at times but at no time did it rock me or touch my soul like Neruda does at times.
So it could of just been lost on me, but it didn't have any soul or grab me.
So it could of just been lost on me, but it didn't have any soul or grab me.
June 10, 2016
Un libro que a mi parecer es un largo poema en prosa. Pero que también es más que eso, y acuso humildemente a mi condición de lector aun inexperto el aun no comprenderlo del todo. Pero de lo poco que he podido apreciar de tu lectura destaco sus imagines poderosas, la prosa impecable y la evocación de un mundo intimo como pocas veces he leido en la literatura peruana.
October 13, 2017
4.5/5 - stunning.
March 26, 2018
#readaroundtheworld Peru
This kaleidoscope of staccato writing was surprisingly appealing to me
This kaleidoscope of staccato writing was surprisingly appealing to me
February 14, 2023
4.5*
«A las seis de la mañana, a las seis de la tarde, son los faroles lo más vegetal del mundo, de una manera analítica, sintética, científica, pasiva, determinante, botánica, simplísima —los troncos sostienen al extremo superior campanas de cristal que encierran flores amarillas—. »
Las primeras páginas me sorprendieron, me aterraron, me descolocaron. Pero también me engancharon, me atraparon, me encantaron. Así que regresé sobre mis pasos y empecé de nuevo, segura de que tendría que leer cuidando la sonoridad de cada palabra, la cadencia de cada párrafo y permitiendo que la razón y la sensibilidad se acoplaran para así poder comprender lo que no hay que comprender.
Este texto de juventud, que el personaje de Martín Adán publica con tan solo diecinueve años, le da la bienvenida al juego en el lenguaje, a la memoria, al flujo del pensamiento, a la ambigüedad y a los mecanismos poéticos; a la reflexión intelectual, al humor inocente que se pinta de humor ácido, a la sensación de enfrentarse a la nostalgia y al desencanto, y a la inevitabilidad del cambio. Pinta con sus palabras fragmentos, viñetas, cuadros cubistas-impresionistas, pequeños retratos de una vida en el balneario de Barranco que ya es sólo recuerdo, que ya sólo existe como fantasma fracturado al que se intenta revivir por medio de la escritura.
Un libro maravilloso. Me gustó más de lo que esperaba y no me sorprendería que, durante un largo tiempo, me descubra volviendo a sus fragmentos para volver a vivirlos.
«A las seis de la mañana, a las seis de la tarde, son los faroles lo más vegetal del mundo, de una manera analítica, sintética, científica, pasiva, determinante, botánica, simplísima —los troncos sostienen al extremo superior campanas de cristal que encierran flores amarillas—. »
Las primeras páginas me sorprendieron, me aterraron, me descolocaron. Pero también me engancharon, me atraparon, me encantaron. Así que regresé sobre mis pasos y empecé de nuevo, segura de que tendría que leer cuidando la sonoridad de cada palabra, la cadencia de cada párrafo y permitiendo que la razón y la sensibilidad se acoplaran para así poder comprender lo que no hay que comprender.
Este texto de juventud, que el personaje de Martín Adán publica con tan solo diecinueve años, le da la bienvenida al juego en el lenguaje, a la memoria, al flujo del pensamiento, a la ambigüedad y a los mecanismos poéticos; a la reflexión intelectual, al humor inocente que se pinta de humor ácido, a la sensación de enfrentarse a la nostalgia y al desencanto, y a la inevitabilidad del cambio. Pinta con sus palabras fragmentos, viñetas, cuadros cubistas-impresionistas, pequeños retratos de una vida en el balneario de Barranco que ya es sólo recuerdo, que ya sólo existe como fantasma fracturado al que se intenta revivir por medio de la escritura.
Un libro maravilloso. Me gustó más de lo que esperaba y no me sorprendería que, durante un largo tiempo, me descubra volviendo a sus fragmentos para volver a vivirlos.
November 23, 2020
Le doy un 3 por la prosa poética, sin embargo, me he apresurado en terminarlo. ¿Por qué? Me generó incomodidad el tono y expresiones misóginas.
En resumen: calidad de prosa y descripciones indiscutiblemente buenas, pero un contenido y puntos de vista que resultan molestos y que (felizmente) siento ya no son vigentes.
En resumen: calidad de prosa y descripciones indiscutiblemente buenas, pero un contenido y puntos de vista que resultan molestos y que (felizmente) siento ya no son vigentes.
August 19, 2021
Simplemente no fue para mí. Debo reconocer que es una prosa muy bien elaborada, aunque me costó entenderla un poco, bastante realmente. Tiene su belleza sutil, aunque algunas partes son un poco misógenas, talvez x pensamientos de la época.
July 30, 2024
El invierno en Barranco.
March 28, 2020
«¡Ah, Catita, la vida no es un río que corre: la vida es una charca que se corrompe!»
January 29, 2025
"Ella ha dejado al crío en la cocina. Y es seguro que ahora no piensa en él: ahora solo piensa en sí misma, en sus pechos que mira temblar, saltar"
¿? ¿? ¿? Las mujeres aquí vistas y tratadas de formas tan vanas, tan sus pechos, "sucia, sucia, sucia" o tan de solteronas que solo así no son impuras y pecadoras. La prosa bien, igual no deja de ser un trabajo escolar bien hecho y sin trama, pero por favor ya tenia 20 cuando salió el libro, puedo pensarlo de un mocoso esta visión a las mujeres de puro arrechismo pero eh? Amo la poesía de Martin Adán pero esta prosa... Dios, además tmbn demasiadas referencias de "mira lo menciono y soy culto" sacadas de la nada y que muchas veces no encaja y se siente como un golpe que te saca de la atmósfera. Quien conozca de su vida sabe que Martin Adán era terrible misógino y patán, lastima que esto se reflejara tanto en este clásico.
Creo que decir que no te gusta este libro es como dejarte a la deriva para que la gente te llame imbécil, que lo escribió un genio y que no lo entendiste y bla bla, pero creo que debería replantearse esta obra y a Martin Adán, porque qué gran poeta era y esta novela es muy poca cosa comparado con su trabajo en verso.
¿? ¿? ¿? Las mujeres aquí vistas y tratadas de formas tan vanas, tan sus pechos, "sucia, sucia, sucia" o tan de solteronas que solo así no son impuras y pecadoras. La prosa bien, igual no deja de ser un trabajo escolar bien hecho y sin trama, pero por favor ya tenia 20 cuando salió el libro, puedo pensarlo de un mocoso esta visión a las mujeres de puro arrechismo pero eh? Amo la poesía de Martin Adán pero esta prosa... Dios, además tmbn demasiadas referencias de "mira lo menciono y soy culto" sacadas de la nada y que muchas veces no encaja y se siente como un golpe que te saca de la atmósfera. Quien conozca de su vida sabe que Martin Adán era terrible misógino y patán, lastima que esto se reflejara tanto en este clásico.
Creo que decir que no te gusta este libro es como dejarte a la deriva para que la gente te llame imbécil, que lo escribió un genio y que no lo entendiste y bla bla, pero creo que debería replantearse esta obra y a Martin Adán, porque qué gran poeta era y esta novela es muy poca cosa comparado con su trabajo en verso.
December 3, 2018
One of the most gorgeously written novels I've ever experienced, made all the more inspiring by the fact that the author was twenty years old at the novel's publication. Way to make me feel like a failure at six years your senior, Adán, you brilliant bastard.
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December 25, 2012Martín Adán writes:
I am not wholly convinced of my own humanity; I do not wish to be like others. I do not want to be happy with the permission of the police.
I am not wholly convinced of my own humanity; I do not wish to be like others. I do not want to be happy with the permission of the police.
August 22, 2013
Read on the flight from Bogota to Lima to get ready to walk the streets of Barranco, a cool mishmash of reflections and poetic musings, reminded me a bit of Lispector, totally dug it.
September 20, 2013
No me ha gustado para nada.
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