Alan Pauls - Dense linguistic foliage and winding narrative paths: story of sexual obsession that leads to meditations, both comic and profound, on love as gift possession, and the possessiveness of love

Alan Pauls, The Past, Trans. by Nick Caistor, Random House, 2007.

www.imdb.com/title/tt0765469/?ref_=nm_knf_t1


"From the author of the much-praised Wasabi: a stunning achievement that has taken the author’s native Argentina and the Spanish-speaking world by storm. The Past is a multi-layered novel that brings to mind the works of Nabokov and Proust."

"A stunning tale of love gone bad: passion, obsession, sex, and cocaine, all in excess—riveting from start to finish. Rímini splits up with his girlfriend of 12 years, Sofía. The parting is initially amicable and he moves on, carefree, with a new zest for life. Hungry to make up for lost time and keen to forget the past, he finds a younger girlfriend and starts using cocaine. Sofía, however, finds herself unable to let go, and continues to reappear on Rímini’s horizon. As hard as Rímini tries to forget, Sofía will not let him. Though the apparently idyllic relationship is over, their love has not died, merely taken on a different form. As time passes and their paths continue to cross, the past festers and torments them, like an infection. Told through a series of flashbacks, this complex and multi-layered novel is a stunning achievement, bringing to mind the works of Nabokov and Proust, while critics have also alluded to Philip Roth and Martin Amis."

"The past, Alan Pauls' first novel to be translated into English, has arrived with a certain amount of fanfare - including a film adaptation starring Gael Garcia Bernal, an appearance at the Edinburgh Festival and critical comparisons to Proust and Nabokov.
Like Proust's epic, The Past is about memory. A twentysomething Buenos Aires couple, Rimini and Sofia, split up after 12 years together, sharing out friends, possessions and living arrangements. But there is a sticking point: their photographs. Sofia wants desperately to divide up the thousand-plus photos they have; Rimini feels repulsed by the pictures. For Sofia, the images are a visual prompt to aid her perfect memory of their years together; for Rimini, they moor him in the past.
Rimini moves on: a new, younger girlfriend, cocaine abuse, work addiction (he is the most productive of multilingual translators) and compulsive masturbation. He marries and divorces, breaks down and recovers. He even becomes a tennis coach. Sofia, meanwhile, haunts him with recollections at pivotal moments in his life. By the final section of the novel she has become the founder member of a remarkable organisation: the Women Who Love Too Much.
A large proportion of the text digresses from this main narrative: the life and works of a fictional painter and pioneer of 'Sick Art', Jeremy Riltse (one of his pieces involves an attempt to have part of his rectum removed and attached to canvas); the tale of the adman who brings Riltse's 'Bogus Hole' to Buenos Aires; the story of the obsessive lover Adele Hugo; the tragic fate of Rimini's junior-school teacher. After about 400 pages, the novel is even good enough to recap an earlier sequence, presumably fearing that the portrayal of amnesia may have brought it on in the reader.
Alongside the novel's internal echoes and ricochets, there are a great number of literary and artistic references, including to Victor Hugo, Althusser, Marx and Freud. Indeed, The Past is peopled with spectres; characters are described as zombies, as ghosts, as ghosts haunting other ghosts or simply as dead. Rimini and Sofia both on occasion refer to each other as dead people, and there are lengthy sections discussing loss, mourning and the status of the survivor.
But surviving what? There is a strange absence in this novel, hinted at with references that may remain unnoticed or inexplicable to the general reader. A Ford Falcon, vehicle of choice of the military's hit squads, brings back 'past memories' for Rimini. After his wife gives birth, Rimini is assailed by the strange fear that their child will be kidnapped or killed. 1976 reoccurs as a gap, and the chaos and violence before and after the coup d'etat is inexplicably absent, despite the lovers' Riltse-chasing school holiday in Europe that luckily allows them to be absent while their country descends into chaos.
This gives the strong impression that Pauls says too much and too little at the same time: digressions into junior-school teaching suggest not a novel written on cocaine, like the translations Rimini produces, but something closer to the headless beast that Professor Grady Tripp engenders while high on weed in Curtis Hanson's film Wonder Boys
There is also a contradiction between the one or two references to Argentinian history and the very international feel of the novel: there is no maté, no coups, no Peronism. Throughout, dates are implied through world-historical events: the Cuban revolution, the moon landings, the fall of the Berlin Wall. The novel is thoroughly international and thoroughly Argentinian at once; it seems to demand familiarity with Argentinian places and dates yet does not clarify what these might imply for any meaning of the novel.
We are all, Pauls seems to say, dead men and women, dead because of an attachment to a past now gone. But the source of this tragedy is only hinted at: twentysomething break-ups and midlife crises, the stuff of Pauls' countrymen Andres Neuman and Gonzalo Garces, do not explain the melancholy or foreboding that characterise the mood of The Past. What might is the debate that drives the novel: how to remember, what to remember; how to experience or live the past in the present. In the end, Pauls' entertaining novel - at times, horribly so - tells every story imaginable except the events that haunt his tale, and that are perhaps the most important story in Argentina's recent history." - Ben Bollig

"Alan Pauls, born in Buenos Aires in 1959, won Spain's Anagrama novel prize in 2003 for this, his fourth novel. At its core, it attempts to rethink the laws of love in dense details through its two principal characters. Indeed, it could have been titled an Anatomy of Love.
After 12 years together, against the current selfish trends, Rimini and Sofia decide to split up, perhaps because they need to experience more life. Rimini, a translator and interpreter with a Dantean name, chooses dissipation: a journey into the hell of 1980s Buenos Aires through addictions to cocaine, masturbation, tennis, translation, a sudden marriage and paternity, until he loses everything. His self-destruction is matched by Sofia's crack-up as her never-failing love for him leads into her own degradation.
Towards the end, now a tennis coach and gigolo, Rimini steals a work of art by a painter named Riltse, whom both had adored, and is imprisoned. He is rescued by Sofia and joins her group of Women Who Love Too Much, named after Victor Hugo's daughter Adèle H: an elegy to female tenacity. Suffering brings them together.
This outline scratches the surface of a love story set in a Buenos Aires with barely a mention of the dirty war, disappearances or shanty towns. Pauls called his novel The Past because we slowly understand through Rimini's passive self-obsessions that the opposite of love is amnesia, that his characters' parallel lives suddenly overlap through a string of coincidences. Fortuitous encounters generate the plot of this pleasingly constructed novel. These encounters create memories of a past Rimini tries to reject, refusing to look at a recurring box of photos.
A key scene is Rimini's discovery of Riltse's painting The Bogus Hole, hanging on the wall in a loo in the flat of a spoilt woman with whom he is monotonously copulating. We then get the history of how that painting ended up there, how Rimini steals it and is rescued from prison by Sofia, with vivid descriptions of Riltse's "Sick Art" and an account of how the horror of love is at the source of this Bacon-like painter. In fact, it's almost an essay within the novel. Rimini sought immersion in real life, but by the end life no longer belongs to him but to the past.
Pauls's allusive novel invokes Proust, Nabokov and, more locally, Cortázar's Hopscotch, with its descent into urban hell, rejection of love and abandoned baby. Long sentences and looping coincidences suggest that love itself is a rhythm of chance events. However, a picaresque strand lightens the dense flow, with much explicit sex and black humour. Rimini is a Candide witnessing late modern in its Buenos Aires versions. Scenes with a homoeopath, or a cocaine-sniffing rock-star, or interpreting for the visiting Jacques Derrida, or bumping into Sofia's father in a love-hotel with his mistress: all stand out.
But most pleasing in this ambitious novel - brilliantly caught in Nick Caistor's translation - is the distancing way Pauls slides in and out of characters who are ghosts of their pasts, without a centre or psychology. He is inside and outside them, so we grasp the logic of their passion of parallel lives that intertwine. It is almost 18th-century in its philosophical meandering, and, emotionally and rationally, deeply satisfying." - Jason Wilson

"WHEN this dazzling sexual odyssey was first published in Barcelona in 2004 it was rumouredtobeahoax. This was partly a reaction to the accolades of several influential Spanish critics, who ranked it alongside the bestofcontemporaryLatinAmerican fiction, and partly the sceptical belief that Alan Pauls was a pseudonym or perhaps a suspiciouslyanglophonicacronym adopted by a group of collaborators.
At first glance the author of The Past did not appear to have one. Born in Buenos Aires in 1959 - that was the extent of his biog. He had no international profile. His work had never been translated from the original Spanish. Eveninhisnative Argentina he had had nothing published in the previous decade. If there was undeniable brilliance in a story of memory, cocaine and addiction to love, it also read as a series of variations and elaborate digressions on new relationships, fresh peccadilloes, with solo, paired, group or fantasy practices surely outside the range of even the most fanatical sexual conquistador. This added to the theory of multiple authorship.
So did the syntax. Multiple clauses, qualifications, extended similes and inexhaustible conjunctions, produced sentences of sometimes above 300 words, compressed in an agoraphobic typography, with dialogue always submerged within a saturated text, page after page. It had all the signs of a committee job. The astonishing paradox was how a novel as compacted and anachronistic as a 19th century broadsheet newspaper should remain so compulsively and intelligently readable.
Flattering comparisons were made with Proust and Nabokov. This view was shared by the panel of the prestigious Herralde Prize when they made the 2003 award to El Pasado. Film director Hector Babenco bought the rights and made a film starring Gael Garcia Bernal, due for release this year. The Spanish doubters were soon confronted with interviews of the author under headlines like "Alan Pauls Exists!" Audiences at the Edinburgh Book Festival will have the chance to confirm this happy fact when Pauls appears on Tuesday to read from this new English translation by Nick Caistor.
Adding to what must have been a demanding task for Caistor is the irony that the central character of The Past is also a professional translator. Rimini attacks his work compulsively, abusing cocaine to produce his formidable 30 pages a day from the French. He becomes a polyglot star, called in as an interpreter and simultaneous translator, but he suffers a kind of linguistic Alzheimer's which leaves him unable to remember foreign languages,exceptinhissleep.This curiousconditionissymptomaticof Rimini's protective amnesia following a separation from his partner Sofia, an art therapist. Rimini wants to escape the past. Sofia seeks ways of spooking him with notes, phonecallsandapparitionstokeep shared memories alive.
Their battle focuses on custody of a collection of 1500 photographs featuring moments from their 12 years together. Rimini refuses to take possession of any of them, but he finds himself snorting up from the glass of a photo frame, and the image beneath it is of Sofia's face. She remains a continuing and ambiguous presence, guardian angel or ghost, as Rimini tries to throw himself into his serial relationships with other women.
His malaise finds another reflection in a wild pastiche biography of an English artist, Jeremy Riltse, who has evolved a Sick Art theory with some hilariously risible attempts to mix his media with anatomical parts. The separate narratives are united when Rimini steals one of the mad artist's lost works, and Sofia assumes a mission to get him out of the police frame.
The Past will reward readers undeterred by its dense linguistic foliage and winding narrative paths. Its handling of sexual obsession is strongly reminiscent of Milan Kundera, and leads to meditations, both comic and profound, on love as gift possession, and the possessiveness of love. The existence of Alan Pauls is surely destined to be more widely celebrated." - John Linklater

Alan Pauls, A History of Money: A Novel, Melville House, 2015.

excerpt

Alan Pauls, one of Latin American literature's rising stars, combines the intimate and the political in a novel that, although it is set in Argentina in the 1970s and ’80s, will bring to mind books like Choire Sicha’s Very Recent History and Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask in its subtle, brilliant depiction of the place of money in its protagonists’ lives. 

It begins with a body: a top executive of an iron and steel company dies after his helicopter, travelling toward the factory where he is due to meet with striking workers, plummets into the river. The briefcase full of money which he was carrying disappears without a trace. Accident, or assassination? And where is the money?
A History of Money revolves around this event, as does the imagination and memory of the unnamed protagonist of the novel, who returns over and over to it even as he reflects on the role of money in his family and his own life. His parents are divorced: his father is a gambler who plays in all-night poker games and carries around all of his money in a wad of cash; his mother is a socialite who squanders her inherited fortune on a lavish lifestyle. Our protagonist, for his part, pays—in every sense of the word.
And his individual story is echoed in the larger story of Argentina in the 1970s and ’80s, where money is everything: promise and punishment, dream and disaster. An intensely evocative novel from one of the world’s most exciting new writers.

The first book published in the U.S. from acclaimed Argentine author Pauls is a stream-of-consciousness novel chronicling a family’s tumultuous relationship with money. The nameless narrator’s mother has left his father and remarried a wealthier man. As the story begins, an executive with a mining company, who is a friend of the narrator’s stepfather, has been sent to deliver a briefcase full of money to a group of striking workers. A bribe? A concession to demands? Payoff for strikebreakers? We never know: the helicopter carrying him crashes, and, though the body is found, the briefcase goes missing. The narrator spends pages evoking the irritating sound the family friend made while chewing crostini, the awful crunching serving as metaphor for a generation’s conspicuous consumption. Such bravura sequences largely take the place of plot—the narrator jumps between reminiscences of his father, reflections on his own life, and stories of his troubled relationship with his mother, darting around time and space, connected by feelings and details but seldom by events. Meanwhile, the economy booms and busts, alternately compounding the family’s calamities and enabling their upswings. Pauls tells the story of this dark and politically troubled period in Argentine history almost entirely through an economic prism, suggesting that materialism is the mother of complicity. This caustic indictment, and the stylistic tour de force through which it’s delivered, should help secure English speakers’ awareness of Pauls as an important writer.—Publishers Weekly

“An eloquent, cycling chimera of economy, currency, and family strained by overburdened purse strings... The frantic urgency of Pauls' fictional take on a nation in flux will resonate for years to come."—Booklist

A man recalls his past through the filter of money—often ill-gotten or badly spent—in this inventive if tangled tale.
The protagonist of this second translated novel by Argentine writer Pauls (The Past, 2003) opens his story at age 14, when he witnessed the funeral of a captain of industry who died in a helicopter crash under mysterious circumstances. The man was a family friend, but the narrator here and elsewhere isn’t interested so much in intimacies and relationships as financial connections: as he drills deeper into his past, he ponders the dead man’s attaché case full of cash, his father’s lifelong gambling habit, his mother’s ineptitude with money, and his own bad investment in a money pit. “Ponder” is the operative term here: Pauls writes in a recursive style built on long sentences with subclauses that aspire to Jamesian girth and gravitas. Credit Pauls for a rhetorical command that keeps these sentences from collapsing (and translator Robins for successfully preserving their integrity). At its best, the strategy conveys the gnarled and interior mental state that such financial fixation produces (in the early sections, the protagonist obsesses over the dead man’s irritating crostini-crunching); at its worst, and too often, it’s simply digressive, overexpanded navel-gazing. That’s all the more frustrating because buried under Pauls’ thickets of prose is a pointed commentary on the fragility of money and the oppressive Argentine politics of the 1960s and '70s. And Pauls can sensitively render the way money both bound and disconnected the novel's hero from his divorced parents. But when it comes time to bring the story to a strong emotional finish, the impact of the climax is overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the prose; though short as a novella, it’s dense as an epic but without the widescreen effects.
A well-intentioned experiment that’s hobbled by its longueurs. —Kirkus Reviews

“The rise of Alan Pauls is the best thing has happened to Argentinean literature since the appearance of Manuel Puig.”—Ricardo Piglia

Argentina, the 70s. The syndicates have been taken over by the radicalized left wing, the industrial belt of Buenos Aires is now referred to as the red belt, and a top executive of an iron and steel company dies after his helicopter, travelling towards the factory, plummets into the river. The briefcase full of money which he was carrying disappears without a trace. Accident or attack? The hypotheses on his death multiply, as do those concerning the location of the money. Is it time to negotiate with the delegates from the syndicates? Or perhaps it is time to corrupt them? Should they finance the illegal repression which will end up decimating them?

The History of Money revolves around this shrouded event, so full of uncertainty, as does the imagination and memory (that paragon of bitter contemplations) of the hero of the novel, who uses this dramatic focal point to revise the role of money in his family saga. He has much to keep him occupied: His father “makes” money in poker games and casinos, and can move like a fish in water around the caves of financial speculation. His mother marries again and squanders her small inherited fortune on a lavish lifestyle and a summer house that does not stop growing, swallowing up every last cent. Our protagonist, for his part, pays- in every sense of the word.
Debts that go unacknowledged, undocumented loans, absurd investments, and clandestine operations: The History of Money is a novel of explicit financial content (just like one would say porn has explicit sexual content). It is a novel of hardcore economy, where sex scenes have been replaced with financial transactions. The economy of the entire country goes mad with no hope of recovery, becoming a centrifuge of inflation and financial speculation. Money is everything: Generosity and violence, possibility and punishment, dream and disaster.
The last instalment of Alan Paul’s trilogy covering the most tempestuous years of Argentina’s recent history, The History of Money, is, just like its antecedents, The History of Tears and The History of Money, an intense and shrill speculation on loss, perhaps contemporary Argentina’s most determining experience.
«A sinister merry-go-round of disturbing political interests, flight of capital, money laundering, urban guerrillas, financial speculators, cunning syndicalists, the shadow of counterrevolutionary militants, embezzlements and bankruptcies, inflationary processes; to sum up, a whirlpool of Machiavellian intrigue and dark schemes… In these times of crisis, this novel constitutes a good example of a narrative genre at its peak: that of “economic-fiction”, a particularly spine-tingling literary format because it ends up becoming a detailed and realistic study of customs. Alan Pauls manages to overwhelm the reader in a labyrinth of nearby terrors and lugubrious prospects: money as the protagonist» (Jesús Ferrer, La Razón).
«Alan Paul concludes his trilogy with a digressive and splendidly narrated book that confirms his place as one of the few truly essential contemporary Argentinean writers. He narrates with skill exactly what happens in a country and among its inhabitants when money means nothing, absolutely nothing, and yet it is the only thing worth counting» (Patricio Pron, ABC).
«History of Money by Alan Pauls (Buenos Aires 1959) does not necessarily close the trilogy made up of History of Tears and History of Hair, but could form a part of (with its virtues and its vices, its liberty and slavery) the infinite necessities of the human being and even constitute a true “history of humanity”. Pauls’ aesthetic demands go hand in hand with his ethical ones in writing guided by perception, intelligence, analytic intensity, the harsh nature of his critical humour and sensitivity towards the losers. The paradox here is that the losers are those who have made money (with their daydreams and their misfortunes) their reason for being. History of Money ably manipulates the illusion of digression in a dark and yet fluid story, always perfectly controlled, in which the profiles of a few characters are gradually completed, each one of them with a distinct attitude towards money... With enormous creative talent Pauls has understood how to submerge us in this delirious world so close to fiction in which the Argentina of the past fifty years comes to life» (J.A. Masolivier Ródenas, La Vanguardia).
«Pauls abandons, let’s say immediately, the consolidated forms of The Past and once again experiments on his literature and on himself, like those scientists who try out their latest formula before anybody else… What he tells is a materialist story that disintegrates into thin air. Money is a flow that slips away. The comedic situations that revolve around money are, without doubt, Argentinean. They move at an inflationary rhythm, that which underlines the unstable character of money… Money, for Pauls, is a romantic instrument and only turns into an index of personal energy» (Juan José Becerra, Los Inrockuptibles, Argentina).
«There is a time of dictatorship before and after dictatorship. In his triptych of novels about the seventies, Alan Pauls looks to redefine the contours of an era that resists transformation into history. More so than the earthquake itself (the terrorism of the State and its genocidal machine), History of Money is about the tectonic shifts that precede it and the violence of its recurrences. This is a brilliant culmination of the series that also includes History of Tears and History of Hair […], this novel focuses on a territory that up until now has been hardly explored by fiction: the political economy that gave rise to (and whose model survived) the last dictatorship» (Patricio Lenard, Otra Parte Semanal, Argentina).
«After the repercussion of The Past, Alan Pauls decided to embark on a project that could tackle the decade of the seventies from an intimate perspective, in which History would storm in through the most unexpected of gaps. Now, after History of Tears and History of Hair, he has published History of Money, a novel built around the mysterious death of a factory worker and the disappearance of a suitcase full of dollars. This instalment closes the trilogy about this debated, limited, witnessed decade, and yet finds within its details, obsessions and everyday vicissitudes a voice box that makes it resonate in the present… Throughout the pages of History of Money we follow the path of a nameless character, obsessed with cash: the kind that doesn’t exist, the kind he has and shows off, the kind he hides, the kind whose amount he is not sure of. Just like in the other novels of the series, Pauls constructs a distant, surgical prose, that’s disarms one of the most public and “social” decades of our history and turns it into a personal way in» (Fernando Bogado, Página 12, Argentina).
«Pauls completes his personal photography of the decade of the grey and black seventies. It is a panoramic photo that ends in an iconic fashion: with the ghost of inflation flying over the whole of history» (Esteban Maturín, Hoy Día Córdoba, Argentina).
«Alan Pauls: “This is a novel for addicts” … In the close of his trilogy about the seventies, the writer makes this “psychotic relationship” which we maintain with Money explicit, as well as its obscene presence in Argentina» (Interview by Guido Carelli Lynch, Clarín, Argentina).
«Alan Pauls: “This is a porno novel with explicit money scenes”…Money as pay, savings, waste, game, inheritance, loans, deposits, bundles of notes, rescue funds, a roll of cash hidden in a built in wardrobe, and above all, as History; an ambitious term that gives History of Money its name. This is a splendid novel that closes Alan Pauls’ trilogy dedicated to “Tears” and “Hair” in its previous instalments, and in which the Argentinean author once again sketches a kind of X-ray of individual and collective “Argentine” life that is delved into, contaminated and archeologically retrieved by money and its vital signs… Question: Why tears, hair, and now money as guiding sub-universes? Alan Pauls: “They are minor but strangely significant elements that seem to condense ghosts that are both personal and of the era, both intimate and historical. Now, with the finished project, it occurs to me that tears, hair and money share two basic properties: they are all valuable things that one is at risk of losing (and the whole trilogy can be read as an exploration of the experience of loss) and things that are regularly falsified (crocodile tears, wigs, fake notes)» (interview by Javier Mattio, La Voz del Interior, Argentina).
«The saga is a history of the impossibilities of an era and the symbols that a determined element allows within it. Tears, hair, money; it is the story of a society or a social class through a particular element. The era is the backdrop; it works in a tangential manner, like a faint footprint that forcefully determines the present… "Look at what is happening today in the black market for dollars”, points out Pauls. “Everything tends towards the murky, the double, and what happens on one side of the mirror is not necessarily what happens on the other”… History is made from what there is, not what is hoped for, what does not arrive, the perspective is negative, pejorative of money that doesn’t appear as a possibility for action but instead as a straightjacket, an element that restricts even if you have it, as its owners fear losing it” (interview by Agencia Télam, Argentina).
«Question: Why those three elements: Tears, hair and money? Pauls: “They are very private elements, very personal, like appendices or bodily emissions.They are three elements that allow me to articulate that intimacy with a public, political and historical world. And they are three very significant elements for me» (Interview by Soledad Vallejos, La Nación, Argentina).
«Pauls was interested in thinking about the “matter of intimacy and politics” to take on this key and turbulent decade that suffered the horrors of the military dictatorship (1976-1983). “Above all I did not want to use the main entrance; I wanted to choose very oblique access points. And I think that tears, hair and money worked as little Trojan horses”, he points out» (Interview in El Universal, Venezuela). - http://www.anagrama-ed.es/foreign/title/NH_514