La Part rêvée

Trilogía las partes #2

by Rodrigo Fresán

Une mystérieuse fondation dédiée à la préservation des songes les plus extraordinaires. Une sœur qui réécrit du fond de l'espace Les Hauts de Hurlevent. Un génie littéraire addict aux papillons. Des parents psychédéliques mettant en scène dans les supermarchés les guérillas des années 1970. Une ville où les librairies sont insomniaques. Et un écrivain qui, lui non plus, ne dort pas, et tente de retrouver un rêve d'enfance.Après avoir exploré les rouages de l'imagination dans La Part inventée, Rodrigo Fresan poursuit sa trilogie sur les coulisses de la création en plongeant dans les engrenages d'une matière première aussi universelle que mystérieuse : les rêves.Livre envoûtant et vertigineux, placé sous le haut patronage d'Emily Brontë, de Bob Dylan et de Vladimir Nabokov, La Part rêvée nous offre une clé des songes et des insomnies, comme seul le grand écrivain argentin pouvait en façonner. Ce magnifique voyage au cœur des mécanismes secrets qui régissent les grandes oeuvres littéraires peut se lire aussi comme une autobiographie cryptée et un cri de révolte face à l'appauvrissement de l'écriture et de la lecture à l'ère numérique.« Si Borges et Pynchon étaient sur un bateau... ce serait Fresan qui sortirait de l'eau. » – Gilles Heuré, Télérama

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Latin American, Spain, 21st Century

576 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2017

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 Strife of Love in a Dream, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, From the Realm of Morpheus… The Dreamed Part doesn’t belong in this array of dreams…

Dreams that – scholars of the matter insist in interviews and documentaries, with faces like those of lying children – are nothing more than electrochemical reactions. Small gusts of energy leaping from cell to cell. Imprecise stimuli nobody really totally believes in. Nobody really knows where dreams come from, and where they’re going, and what they’re for. You could say – with equal certainty – that dreams are, actually, the thoughts of guardian angels. And nobody could dispute it; because if dreams exist, why can’t angels who dream them also exist.

The Dreamed Part is a somnambulistic trek through the infinite labyrinth of literature…
“Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.” Jorge Luis Borges
Narrator, as a dreamlike spirit, endeavours to ascend into Onirium – an ethereal temple of dreams in the empyrean domain – and join there his muse Ella, the high priestess of dreaming…
Meanwhile, his sister, secluded in the monastic mental asylum, keeps mixing with the schizoid tulpas – ectoplasmic simulacra of imaginary beings – of Brontë Sisters…

The reader is a robber of tulpas. Someone who uses and abuses bodies and souls created by others and incorporates them into that other life within life, that life that takes place inside books. Letting someone else do the hard and dirty work first and only then, at the end, with the table set and guests at the ready, does the reader show up.

And the somewhat somnolent author, suffering from severe insomnia, creates his own literary dreams and puts them down on paper…

His bed moves.
His bed travels.
The sheets like sails, the pillows like clouds where gulls get tangled and can only escape by leaving behind their feather suits, and his memories like a voyage across mutinous waves that he shouts at from the command bridge. And they pretend to obey him. From his bed, the world is horizontal, like a beach where, lying down, he walks in reverse, backward, burying his feet again in the sandy echo of his own footsteps.

Our past is our memory, the books we’ve read and dreams we dreamt.

[Glenn Russell]

Oh, how I wish a dozen of our leading literary lights, critics such as James Wood, Parul Sehgal, Michiko Kakutani, Dwight Garner and Jonathan Lethem would each contribute an essay to a book devoted to Argentine author Rodrigo Fresán's The Dreamed Part.

Such a volume of critical commentary would be most helpful since, with this novel under review, Rodrigo Fresán expands what it means to write maximalist fiction of the highest caliber. You want a main character who is an exwriter (author's word) musing on sleep, dreams and the waking life, you want elements of science fiction and splashes of biography, you want extensive literary critique, you want the inclusion of popular culture (Bob Dylan, The Beatles, et al.) and philosophy (Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche, Cioran, et al.), you want multiple narrative pathways with hundreds and hundreds of literary refrences with a list that includes the likes of the Brontë sisters, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Nabokov, Vila-Matas, Kundera, Sebald, Auster and Austen – step right up, folks, The Dreamed Part is undoubtedly your book. Special call-out to translator Will Vanderhyden, winner of the 2018 Best Translated Book Award.

We first met the unnamed narrator in The Invented Parts back when he was a writer of novels with a metaphysical death wish – to hurl himself in the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva in order to merge with the cosmos. But, alas, he failed (natch) and the writer now finds himself as an ex-writer due to an incurable case of insomnia. Sidebar: This Rodrigo Fresán cycle of three novels includes Volume 1: The Invented Part (I wrote a seperate review), Volume 2: The Dreamed Part and Volume 3: The Remembered Part due to be published April, 2022.

So much happening in The Dreamed Part. For the purposes of my review, I'll focus on the first fifty pages where our protein author begins to lay the groundwork for much that follows. I'll do this by linking my comments to a bushel basket of direct quotes:

“The text – in the most suspended of animations – opening its eyes when the book opens, every time it is read, as if upon entering that place a light turns on so the light can shine out.”

Such an intriguing way to look at reading: when we open a book, it's as if a light automatically turns on, providing light enough to illuminate a reader, reminiscent of Ezra Pound's famous: “Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”

“With that combination of devotion and fear that overcomes you, in the dark, watching a luminous and illuminating loved-one sleep. And, just then, acknowledging and being fully aware, inside a darkness all our own, that the person we love will never be entirely open, known, legible, and comprehensible to us.”

Much of the novel consists of internal monologue. The writing is so fluid we hardly ever notice the absence of traditional dialogue. Here the exwriter reflects on the darkness of our waking state where we are forever separated from one another, even from a loved one. Counterposed against the waking state, we have deep sleep where all humanity (and all of life) come together. Yes, echoes of The Beatles.

“The books remain, the work, yes. But in the past, and ever further from life itself, and as if they were no longer yours. Because if that mysterious mechanism that turns on during (in the most private and ineffable moment of the profession, in the act of writing itself) isn't cyclically rereleased, everything written in the past begins to reject the author.”

The tragedy for the exwriter (and all writers who wish to write but can no longer write): not only are you incapable of writing in the present but all your previous works actively turn their back on you and run away, fast! And not only do we have the exwriter but The Dreamed Part also spotlights the exwriter's sister Penelope, a writer of a series of novels about three sisters (loosely based on the Brontë sisters) who live on the moon. Recall I mentioned science fiction back there.

“Few things are more fragile than someone who has been left without words and whose infrequent handwriting, always, seems to spring forth from the private earthquake of that atrophied claw, once a flexible hand of movement both harmonious and forceful, like a conductor...Now, the emperor's thumb forever pointing down, making it impossible to even sustain the weight of a pen and its ink.”

Thanks, Rodrigo! What an incredibly powerful image to express the dilemma for someone who can no longer write – even the very act of holding a pen (or, by extension, sitting at a computer keyboard) becomes sheer torture.

“Foot-tapping footnotes that lose more readers than telling dreams. And that make you lose more listeners – like reading with the ears – than speeches.”

Through his exwriter narrator, it is as if Rodrigo admits the conundrum of a novelist who starts to write about dreams – that novelist stands to lose many of his or her readers. Same thing goes for a novelist who incorporates footnotes – many readers will either skim the footnotes or not read them at all. And too many footnotes might force readers to simply stop reading the novel. In this respect, Rodrigo is spot-on – he's written a challenging novel that's a doorstop (545 pages) with many recounted dreams and oodles of footnotes.

“A voice that's like the flipside of a language and not the language it speaks, as if it were the shadow of the voice and not the voice itself speaking.”

Ah, narrative voice, one of the great strengths of Rodrigo Fresán's writing where the words embody turbocharged vitality and exuberance.

“Dreams are an aesthetic work, perhaps the earliest aesthetic expression.”

Think about this statement. Do you remember your own dreams? Do those powerful, memorable dreams you recall possess the qualities of a well crafted short story or a vivid work of art?

“Or, at the very least, he could make use of the network of secret tunnels that lead to the Onirium and where the people who work there move, coming and going. Sleepless. The inexact scientists who study the inexact science of dreams. The people who committed the dark error that awoke The White Plague.”

One of the more intriguing parts of the first section of the novel: dreams appear to be sold to and studied by an organization known as the Onirium. I say “appear” since the dreamed part of The Dreamed Part consists of much dreaminess, a Strawberry Fields land where nothing is clear and nothing to get hung about. Can we say the same thing about the White Plague plunging an entire population into life without dreams? You'll have to read and judge for yourself.

The Dreamed Part is a novel for avid readers and dedicated dreamers along with those inspired beings willing to take on the fabulous Fresán.


Argentine author Rodrigo Fresán, born 1963

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fresan's second part is a dream incarnate. It contains a plenitude of poetry, mixed similes, mingled metaphors, quirks, smarm, charms, verve, meandering melancholia, free-form, dare-I-say dreamlike anomalies, pop-quoting, trans-textual, atemporal, hallucino-generic, and anti-modern coagulations of language. It quivers; it writhes. What with all the billowing prose exudations, the quavering, stuttering processes of thought, the cathedrals of suggestion, the post-Proustian tight-rope-straddling, the encyclo-mytho-poetic verbivoratious, anecdotal maxims, it swells to the proportions of a particle accelerator of words, of sentences, piled up and paragrabbing, paraglyphing, parachewing, in maximalistical experimenial, penumbral, peripatetic precipitation, a preposterous product of monstrous reprisals, of liter-airy illusions swilling gargantic biblio-gargling mind-wash, all while riffling, rapping, grappling, doubledreaming, sentences experiment on each other, and experience existential crises, until they are forced to cruise over fallen foes and compose footbridges from those floating prose-corpses. His pages are composed of an organic mulch emulsified through ferocious observations bordering on divination. This thing corrupts the DNA of the novel form. It is a formulaic un-novel, birthed from the ur-mind, umbilicaled to the collective (fractal) consciousness, unraveling a consistent accumulation of abstraction, which acquires gravitational pull toward some frightening, undefined singularity. While metamesmeric, tessellated interrelations merge in sybillance (sic.), recalling the elusive phantom of imaginative epiphany, the subversion of pre-packaged cliches, acquiring biological momentum, its very own patented A. I.. It might be self-referential, self-propagating, conjuring thought-polyps, as it posits infinite scenarios of its precognitive dissonance, while dreams are playacted by munchkin homunculi behind our eyelids, and kaleidoscopic menageries, in cinematastic splendor, recount a recursive quest for truth, within an embryonic echo chamber, reenacting the dreamed fiction of human history, with post-hypnotic stress disorder. It relishes its incompleteness, with circumlocuitous convolutions, a slave to the word-smith within us all, a willing tribute to the tribal tribune of writers writing about writers reading about readers. Fresan writes his way out of a box with 15 open sides, and is trapped in an amnesiac loop wherein he pines for the nostalgic afternoons spent in a bookstore which never closes, which contains infinite floors and each floor infinite shelves, each shelf infinite volumes (et chetera ad infinitum), spinning tapestries of delicate cadence, leitmotifs galore, compressed digressions, regressed impressions, conversensational, lexdysic trajectories of dreamscience, oozing dreamessence, in endless variations - the literary equivalent of Groundhog Day on repeat, until it becomes Nidhog Day, in dreams nurtured in coma fugue, in slomo pulp-promo locomotive emotional, talismanic, contexual reflexion, both morphological and serpentine - to put it simply, he never gets to the point, even while his beatific, oneiric reality is extruded from a dream within a dream (ad nauseum), and it becomes less a novel and more a continuous essay on dreamlogic, with so many references and quotes, it's hard to distinguish what's appropriated from what's original - blurring the line - repetitive save-scrubbing and polishing, wear and tear, both of the reader's attention and the writer's technique.

It examines how media transposes its layers into real life, how books/ film/ music transform reality for us, so that we can better consume it. Our relationship to other humans is interpreted through these mediums & our celebration of culture is a result of our technological accomplishments, our idolizations and our obsessions. It is at once intimate, irreverent, wily and bloated. The primary discussion moves from the aforementioned into 19th and 20th century literature, the Brontës and Nabokov in particular. Circular digressions ensue. The "radiation of influence" is everywhere apparent.

A discussion, a forum, a panel, for pop culture enthusiasts. More than 1 Twin Peaks reference and innumerable 2001 and Twilight Zone plugs, an accumulation of character biases, the microstories within paragraphs - with all these, Fresan purposely spoils endings - he did it in the last one and he does it here. Alberto Manguel tried to do this in his books on reading, that is to say, to communicate the painful joy of reading certain books. The way they have a powerful effect on sensitive aesthetes and often massage souls into bibliophilic rapture.

If the endless concoction of slipshod biographies of his favorite writers don't bother you, he still blathers to the point of minute obsession. Fresan is an idol-worshipper of the highest order. The literary giants exert such influence upon him that the intimidation of their lingual prowess prevents him from joining their ranks. He is a fan-boy with consummate ability, down-played into imitative madness. What he manages to communicate is the desperation of the lonely, misunderstood artist, the deception of perception. This is a well-padded goddess-medusa, full of pomp and circumdance. Spoofing, complaining, giddy, fierce ineluctable modalities of the frigid and dead interiors of modern humankind.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

A book for readers. A book for dreamers. A book for insomniacs.

[Kevin Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

The 2nd of Rodrigo Fresan’s “Part” trilogy. Have you ever wanted a book to be released more than The Remembered Part? No, me neither. I’m really psyched. This was a little more of what we got in The Invented Part. A little more hallucinatory. A lot more Nabokov. Every page was terrific. While I continue to share the same love of literature and films as the writer, this will still resonate with you if you don’t. Just read it. You’ll love it. Extra points from because the first “real” piece of literature I fell in love with was Wuthering Heights. Will always have a special place in my heart.

[jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

nothing upsets or unsettles someone who doesn't read more than the happiness of someone reading.

the dreamed part (la parte soñada) is the second volume of rodrigo fresán's incomparable and nearly indescribable trilogy, preceded by the best translated book award-winning the invented part and followed by the remembered part (la parte recordada) [to be published in spanish this fall]. the argentina-born, barcelona-based self-described "referential maniac" plunges us back into the dizzying, delighting realm of his singular imagination.

(the doctor who discovers the vaccine for the literary vocation will receive the nobel prize in medicine and in literature, for services rendered to the art, thereby eliminating so many loose toxins and viruses).

picking up on the story begun in the first volume, the dreamed part is nearly a tale adjacent, filling in and elaborating upon aspects of the writer's life we learned earlier. this time, however, the writer is plagued by insomnia and muses obsessively on sleep, dreams, and all manners of restlessness (both somnial and existential). nabokov, the brontës, ever more dylan and beatles, fresán once again links so many disparate threads to create an overlying map of our world itself.

think about it a little: not that long ago none of you were going around carrying those little devices with you everywhere and you lived lives that were more or less the same as the ones you live now and you were masters of the same intelligence quotient and the same powers of internal and external observation... tell me, what is it that has changed so much in your lives and the lives of your acquaintances in recent years that has made you feel the obligation or need to share everything that happens to you and everything that you happen to think of, eh?

fresán's deliberations on dreams and insomnia are frequently striking. in so many ways, it's not simply that he's telling a story set within our world, but instead one that manages to be our world. fresán's talents for making connections between seemingly unrelated people, places, events, things, and ideas are legion. nothing in fresán's fiction feels far away, indeed it often seems he's writing from an entrenched vantage point within. it doesn't so much resemble our reality, as it is our reality.

dreams.
everyone dreams there inside and on the stage.
everyone asking all the time for night to fall so the curtain can rise.
everyone insisting on the motif that the line—just a chalked indication on the floor of where to stand to recite the trance-like monologue—that separates the real from the fantasy, wakefulness from dream, is very thin.

if you're already familiar (and fond!) of fresán's work, this second volume of his part trilogy offers another feast of the fun, fantastic, and unforgettable. with the writerly life and authorial ambition as fresán's galactic center, the dreamed part is every bit as exceptional as its predecessor, if tinged by the hazy reverie found often between the sleeping (dreaming) and waking states.

read rodrigo fresán. and then tell everyone you know to read him, too.

and so, inventing and dreaming and remembering like the three faces of memory.
three books configuring a trilogy, not linear and advancing, but horizontal and happening simultaneously (all times at the same time, like the time of that cosmic voyager untethered from time).

*impressively translated from the spanish by the btba-winning will vanderhyden (labbé, cozarinksy, marsé, and gandolfo)

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Senryu Review:

Sizzling talent in
oneiric odyssey
with prose licked by Gods

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rodrigo Fresan continues his so-called 'trilogy of parts' in his latest novel replete with a 'dream' symbolism that finds its calling from several literary and countercultural references including a dissecting analysis of the protagonist's sister's books (modelled on the Brontë sisters) and a moving paen to the genius of Vladimir Nabokov and one of his last completed works. The whole impetus of the work is, like the previous installment, on the writer and his devoted attachment to literary works. In entirety, this one is tougher and harder getting into compared to the previous volume The Invented Part. Probably this may be on account of the turgid midsection of the book and its obsession with multifarious literary allusions that are often hard getting into. Probably the most obvious passages of this section is when the ex-writer of the novel concentrates his gaze on his sister's literary attachments which at once turns the novel into an attentive character study of siblings, whose lives in the real world are secondary to their relationships with books. He delves deep into the world of her novels that feature three sisters who live on the moon, modelled ostensibly on the three Brontë sisters and their works, and several dream-like references within. Fresan, with his devious wit, uses this as a medium to get into an in-depth literary criticism of the sisters and their works- a device which he quite cleverly used in the previous volume to represent the last work of F.Scott Fitzgerald and his literary and cultural associations.

The latter half of the book reads almost like a dedication to one of his literary muses, Vladimir Nabokov. It is as if Fresan were writing a critical preface or an introduction to a complete collected edition of his works in English. The medium of literary allusion only thickens hereby, to deepen, never to relax throughout the entire work. Fresan devotes quite a lot of space to launch into an extensive diatribe focusing on his novels Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle and Transparent Things, and also delves into a sketch for a novel on Nabokov, which the ex-writer of the book knows he will never complete. There is even a reflection on the paradoxes of modern technology and the way these devices have infiltrated the world of the reader for worse.

Indeed the average reader would be be looking in vain for a unifying theme in this digressive and brooding masterpiece. This is a book, like the others before it, clearly about narrative itself and the way that stories help us understand ourselves when nobody else will listen. To sum it all up, here you will find the same echoes of Kensington Gardens and The Invented Part, that of a book with extensive digressions and discursions into contemporary literature and counterculture. Indeed, there is hardly any plot or structure that you can identify with. Folks, this is modern metafiction of the 21st century and it can be well stated that the author has created a new genre entirely his own.

[Rachel Cordasco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only 5 stars because Goodreads doesn't let you give 10.

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

And everybody happy.

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[Michael Kuehn · Rating 5 out of 5]

“What a difference a day makes, twenty-four little hours . . .” The great Dinah Washington, released in 1959 winning her a Grammy (though first released by the Dorsey Brothers in 1934), the perfect score to the fleeing, gun-toting Lola and Manni, Lola, running throughout ‘Lola rennt,’ reliving and reliving twenty critical minutes, minutes of life and death. What went before, the alternate choices made and not made, it’s what makes this juxtaposition of action and song so powerful, a song forever married to that scene in my memory, waking or otherwise. Dinah’s signature song. “What a difference a day makes” or a month or a year: what a difference a new reading makes – this novel, this ‘The Dreamed Part’ was discarded midway by me a year ago [bogged down as I was in Penelope’s Wuthering [Withering] Heights obsession] – my choice -- and now? Incredible. What was I thinking? What manner of brain chemistry was it that put me in such a mood that I’d close the final chapter on Fresán’s deuxième tome of a trilogy? Was it nights without dreams​, those months after joining the punk group New Insomniacs? JR. Mulligan Stew. A Book of Memories -- all meet the same fate, a big fat DNF at – 523 / 219 / 308 respectively – the page where the uncompromising calculus of age, life expectancy, TBR, and tedium stares you in the face demanding a decision. Stubbornly persevere against listless lids and long-past-waning interest, or admit defeat, preserve precious reading time for the next book? Or was it the lingering fog of insomnia, not unlike the notable sufferer of ‘The Dreamed Part’? Something to be said for second chances. For heeding Dinah Flo «I’m glad I found you / Glad my worlds [words?] around you»

† Reading portions of ‘The Dreamed Part’ – from 327 for 50+ pages on insomnia – while I, too, was without dreams, in the black quiet of night, surely the best time to read, in my own insomnimaniacal ferment, created the curious perception of the book writing my present. Absorbed in Fresán’s dreamless night, in my own dreamless night, I was in no need of my usual dreamless night/waking dream remedies, in order of preference: « Keith Morrison’s calming, smooth and cultured accounts of murder and mayhem streamed continuously on my Echo » « Dragnet radio episodes, with the four-note theme as recognizable as Jaws, circa early 1950s with the terse, soporific Sgt. Joe Friday, sponsored by Chesterfield » « Julia Kent’s looped cello soundscapes » « the early ambient albums of Brian Eno, Music for Airports: Ambient Music 1 »  « Hovhaness’ orchestra with whales Op. 229 (they sound like the heptapods of ‘Arrival’)»

† ‘The Dreamed Part’ is a book to occupy your waking dreams. It is an incredible exploration of writing and the writing life, of memory, of invention, and of the importance of our literary heritage for current and future writers. Fresán has created something wonderfully unique, a rare combination of depth and erudition with pure joy and exhilarating entertainment. I look forward to the final installment in his trilogy, ‘The Remembered Part,’ due in my mailbox on Tuesday, June 14.

"The past slipping in through windows of today that we forgot to shut before going to sleep and running through the straight corridors of a tomorrow through which we'll no longer be able to circulate. And, ah, that terrible moment when you discover all your wishes are no longer in the future but in the past. That burning icy instant when it dawns on you -- a phrase in three times, all times in one line -- that what will be is no longer what you thought it would be." -- The Dreamed Part, Rodrigo Fresán

[Fede Boccacci · Rating 4 out of 5]

No son fáciles de describir estos libros de Fresán en los que uno puede perderse como entre las cientas de ramificaciones, donde los mundos cambian de una página a otra y dónde hay tantas ideas dando vuelta en simultáneo. Porque entrar en una novela de Fresán es perderse en el caos creador de la cabeza de un escritor y en el proceso de escritura.

Ese es el tema central de toda la saga de las partes (la inventada, la soñada y la recordada): qué le pasa al escritor cuando escribe y cómo un escritor llega a serlo.
Esta parte soñada se centra en los sueños como mecanismo de escritura (y el insomnio, la noche, el ensueño, la luna, los sueños recurrentes…). Del "nextcritor" niño soñador que lo único que quiere en la vida es escribir, al "excritor" adulto insomne que ya no sabe si puede hacerlo.
Como siempre hay extensas referencias, en este caso a Cumbres Borrascosas, Nabokov, 2001, Vonnegut y Slaughterhouse Five, The Beatles.

La novela tiene muchos momentos muy interesantes y divertidos, sobre todo en los primeros dos capítulos. Rescato: toda la situación del excritor que vendió su sueños recurrentes al Onirium, la escena de las múltiples posibilidades del encuentro entre él y ella en la librería; el amor de Penélope (hermana del escritor) por Cumbres Borrascosas y el invento de las tres hermanas tulpas en la luna que terminan siendo los alter egos de las hermanas Brontë.

Acá tres frases en las que el libro se describe a sí mismo:
“Un libro que piense como un escritor en el acto de ponerse a pensar un libro, en lo que piensa cuando se le ocurre un libro, cuando ese libro le ocurre, y qué ocurre con ese libro”.

“Al mercado de los libros no le interesaba ningún libro acerca de los libros. Se pedía otra cosa: vida escrita pero no vida de escritor.”

“Con el tiempo te preguntarán, una y otra vez, aquello de «¿Cómo se le ocurren esas ideas que escribe?». Y, con esa cara de paréntesis, ese escritor que siempre seguirá siendo ese niño se preguntará a sí mismo cómo es que nunca le preguntan algo mucho más importante, o, al menos, más interesante, que «¿Cómo se le ocurren esas ideas que escribe?». Por qué nunca le preguntan: «¿Cómo se le ocurrió la idea de ser escritor?».”

[od1_40reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

This week I ‘finished’ the second part of Fresán’s The Parts Trilogy – ‘The Dreamed Part’. But to say that I’ve finished it, implies that it’s done, move on. I don’t think I’ll be done with this book (or whole Trilogy) for a very long time, if ever. There’s so much in here that I’m certain I’ve not yet processed, or even fully understood, and I’m not yet on to the third and largest instalment.

So I’m not gonna attempt an in-depth review at this point, other than to say that if you’re not yet started on The Parts Trilogy, you’re doing books wrong (in my opinion). Both ‘The Invented Part’ and ‘The Dreamed Part’ are sublime. I said this in my write up on the first book, Fresán is a literary genius, easily sitting along side other heroes of mine, Gaddis, Pynchon, Gass, Sontag… to name a few.

These are books for everyone with a huge love of literature and an unhealthy in interest in its writers. In the second half of this second volume Fresán goes into full lit crit mode, which is where it really came alive for me. The first book focuses heavily on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Tender Is The Night’ (which I haven’t yet read, and didn’t seem to spoil things), here in the second part ‘Wuthering Heights’ takes centre stage. Unlike ‘Tender Is The Night’, to get the most out of this second volume you really do need to have read Emily Brontë. So do that first. The pages on WH are nothing sort of hilarious. Included is a 4ish page (I think) synopsis of the entire novel, and it is quite simply brilliant. Literally laugh out loud moments.

Nabokov also features heavily, though this is more on the main character’s admirations of all things Nabokovian. So unlike Brontë, the need to have read all of the referenced works is much less, though an awareness of them is definitely helpful (‘Shut the F*ck up, Memory!’ will never leave me!)

Next then is the third and final part, ‘The Remembered Part’, which is a bit of tome compared to the first and second volumes (and they take enough to get through!). Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ features heavily I’m told, so I’ll soon be doing reread as it’s been about 25 years since I last read it.

[David Sweet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not sure if I read this or dreamed that I read it but it was quite a ride and well worth all of the effort.

[Braden Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dear Rodrigo,

I am inclined to follow Henry James up to a point when he writes, "tell a dream, lose a reader." You, on the other hand, even with all your admiration for James, seem to have eschewed his advice with sadistic glee. It reminds me of a response I once received from an agent that my novel had too many dreams in it, and that this would inevitably lose readers. While, I admit, I rolled my eyes at the agent's assuredness, I took him seriously enough to cut a good 50 pages of dreams from Solarium. I can't help but think your book might have benefited from the same editing advice. Which leads me to what it is exactly I want to ask you.

Am I missing something here about maximalism? I have often wondered if maybe there is something about the need to stuff a book with as much collated, encyclopaedic information as possible that draws a certain kind of reader. I ask myself about the motivation to read a book like this. Do I read to flaunt my ability to read a writer's writer, to read by virtue of a book's lack of readers, to be set apart from the masses of readers who pick up whatever sits on the "whats hot?" table at the Waterstones? A long novel that reads more like a long essay on the importance of reading difficult books, that stretches on as a diatribe against cellphones? Am I to take pride in my shared feelings with your Writer? Because what has happened is the opposite. His referential mania has spoiled the good soup of fictions in The Invented Part, his constant need to beat the dead horse of his Luddite sentiments has added too much salt to a balanced recipe. I almost imagine you, in the process of writing this book, with a sneaky smile, visualizing in your mind your dream reader, the one who can endure all your addendums, the one who will not cry out when you shout "More Dreams! More References! Another Nabokov Anecdote! One Last Fun Fact about the Brontës! I Swear, this is the last one!"

Your book has within it the core of a very very good novel, even a very good novel about a referential maniac. As you say yourself, Nabokov seemed to have done it within the span of one short story, in "Signs and Symbols." Again, this is not to say I did no enjoy much of this book, but I did find myself experiencing a certain level of relief when the flow of prose returned to the Writers childhood, to Uncle Hey Walrus and Penelope. I wish to be told a story and to be moved by it. So, I will approach The Remembered Part with some mild trepidation, remembering my affection for The Invented Part, and I admit, I will have to take a short break from you for a little while. It's not you, it's me. It's all been too much. I need to wake up now, I feel like I have just awoken from too long a sleep. My eyes are crusty, my mind is boggled. I need time to adjust again. In the meantime, I will read some of the authors I have been meaning to read or return to: Saul Bellow, W.G Sebald, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

- Braden

[Matthew Linton · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Dreamed Part is the second novel in Rodrigo Fresán’s ambitious trilogy, and it’s a challenging but often brilliant work. My relationship with Fresán’s writing is mixed: when he’s on topics that resonate—like memory, nostalgia, or Bob Dylan—his prose is dazzling. ✨ But when he focuses on themes that don’t speak to me—such as insomnia or Wuthering Heights—I find it difficult to stay engaged.

The novel begins with an extended meditation on dreaming. Fresán himself warns that “to tell a dream is to lose a reader” (p.12), and unfortunately, I found this to be true during the early pages. A meandering exploration of the narrator’s dream life eventually gives way to familiar ground: his sister Penelope and her obsession with Wuthering Heights—a thread that continues from The Invented Part. 😵‍💫

Thankfully, the second part of the novel finds Fresán at his best. He begins to unravel the complex relationship between memory and dreams—how recollection blurs into invention, and how dreams reshape our memories. This section not only reignites the novel’s momentum but also clarifies the purpose of the trilogy: to explore memory’s three facets—inventing, dreaming, and remembering (p. 536).

Though often frustrating, The Dreamed Part ultimately rewards patient readers. It’s a demanding, often brilliant book that left me genuinely excited for the final installment: The Remembered Part.

[Oliver Terrones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me ha gustado menos que su primera parte, 'La parte inventada' (2014), pero disfruté la parte que se enfoca en el insomnio, el inicio delirante que recorre perspectivas del sueño y el ensueño y sobre todo el final de tipo hechizante. Es curioso su tono naturalista como si al ser su objeto el sueño, las formas arriesgadas en un ensayo pudieran convertirse en prosa poética y perder el hilo de una trilogía. Por momentos siento que Las Partes de Fresán es lo que quiso hacer Fuentes con 'Terra Nostra' (1975) o 'Cristóbal Nonato' (1986) y no le salió.
—

"[...] inventar y soñar y recordar como las tres caras de la memoria..."

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the first book of this trilogy (The Invented Part), a challenging read but very rewarding. The Dreamed Part however, was just wilfully difficult with few rewards. Some parts just didn’t work for me and at times it became a slog. Of course there were other parts that did recall the brilliance of the previous book but I felt that this one just slipped away from me. A bit disappointed with the book and myself, perhaps.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well here we go. Writing a review of a book by Rodrigo Fresan requires a significant amount of chutzpah. What could I add or take away from a writer of such genius?
This was the third book of Fresan's I have read. Once again he uses his creative and insightful gifts to communicate what few other authors can. There is no easy way to say what that something is that he communicates. Perhaps the interior of our consciousness while we grapple with what "is".
Having said all that I can't help adding a few thoughts. Fresan's penchant for following his literary digressions to a pedantic cul-de-sac impair his work as a whole. The digressions are typically brilliant but don't serve the book well. I can't imagine he could find an editor to work with but, should he be able to, it could be immensely valuable. Easily 100-150 pages of this work would be best served in their own book.
Nonetheless, a writer of immense talent and genius.

[Maria Azpiroz · Rating 1 out of 5]

Es el libro de un lector voraz. No es una novela, no es un ensayo, es una novela quizás de tono periodístico. Prefiero leer un ensayo o una novela directamente. Se me escapa la buena crítica que recibió este libro. Las referencias bibliográficas de Fresán, son los libros que me gustan pero prefiero leer cualquiera de ellos 100 veces, a leer 10 páginas de este texto. Hay demasiado para leer y poco tiempo parece ser la tesis de este libro. No podría estar más de acuerdo con Fresán, de modo que este libro va a ser probablemente el último que lea de este autor.

[Aaron Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, didn't quite reach the heights of the first, but still one of the most brilliant book I have read. Continuously pushing up against the boundary of what a novel is, can be, has been, etc.

[A L]

It read long at some points but still paid off.

[Kate Sherrod · Rating 5 out of 5]

Didn't love this quite as much as I did The Invented Part but figure it's middle chapter problems as much as anything. Still invested enough to be unwilling to wait for Will Vanderhyden to get this translated (though I know it'll be good) so I've already started reading the third volume in Spanish. If that's not love, what is? More at Kate of Mind

[Brooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a lot going on. But sometimes it feels like nothing is going on.

[Greg McConeghy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Abandoned after 50 pages. DNF

[Dave Barie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not many writers taking the kind of chances Fresán takes. The result, something that burns hot in your hands leaving you scorched and wanting more. Thankfully ‘more’ will be here in April 2022.