Andrés Neuman, Traveller of the Century, Trans. By Nick Caistor & Lorenza Garcia, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2012.
"Searching for an inn, the enigmatic traveler Hans stops in a small city on the border between Saxony and Prussia. The next morning, Hans meets an old organ-grinder in the market square and immediately finds himself enmeshed in an intense debate—on identity and what it is that defines us—from which he cannot break free.
Indefinitely stuck in Wandernburg until his debate with the organ-grinder is concluded, he begins to meet the various characters who populate the town, including a young freethinker named Sophie. Though she is engaged to be married, Sophie and Hans begin a relationship that defies contemporary mores about female sexuality and what can and cannot be said about it.
Traveler of the Century is a deeply intellectual novel, chock-full of discussions about philosophy, history, literature, love, and translation. It is a book that looks to the past in order to have us reconsider the conflicts of our present. The winner of Spain’s prestigious Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, Traveler of the Century marks the English-language debut of Andrés Neuman, a writer described by Roberto Bolaño as being “touched by grace.”
"In Wandernburg, halfway between Berlin and Leipzig, a young traveler and translator named Hans finds himself strangely captivated by the town’s enigmatic geography and a kindly cave-dwelling organ-grinder. Invited to share his views on politics and literature at a weekly salon, he meets the irrepressible Sophie, who is his intellectual equal and soul mate but who also happens to be engaged to a local nobleman. At first, Hans and Sophie caress each other with mere words and glances, amid passionate discussions of Fichte and federalism. Later, they graduate to the intimacies of collaborative translation projects, as well as more corporeal forms of intercourse. But as their love grows, the structures of their Romantic-era world shift and crumble around them, and neither the lovers nor the seemingly timeless Wandernburg itself will ever be the same. Imaginatively grafting twenty-first-century literary sensibilities onto solid nineteenth-century roots, Neuman’s first novel to appear in English is a rare and delightful masterpiece: a touching love story with big things to say about Europe, the emancipation of women, and the craft of literary translation. A novel of ideas with a poet’s soul." - Brendan Driscoll
"Good readers will find something that can be found only in great literature, the kind written by real poets, a literature that dares to venture into the dark with open eyes and that keeps its eyes open no matter what... The literature of the twenty-first century will belong to Neuman and a few of his blood brothers.” —Roberto Bolaño
“[With Traveler of the Century] Neuman has achieved the dream of every novelist: the Total Novel, a venture accomplished only by major authors like Tolstoy, Musil, and Faulkner.” —Miguel García-Posada
“One of the best novels that I have read in a long time.” —Santos Sanz Villanueva
“The work of a master of narrative art.” —José RiÇo Direitinho
“[Neuman’s] Wandernburg is as mobile and conceptual as a Calvino city, as metaphorical as a Borges country, as cheerful as García Márquez’s Macondo . . . Neuman, with Traveler of the Century, has multiplied the literary language and created a classic.” —Daria Galateria
“ A masterpiece... Neuman is not only brilliant news for Latin American literature, but for European literature as well.” —Maarten Steenmeijer
“Neuman was singled out for praise by Roberto Bolaño and it’s easy to see why: like that late author, Neuman combines love and intrigue with serious intellectual engagement. A novel of ideas somewhere between Kafka’s The Castle and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Neuman’s English-language debut is a rich deconstruction of the competing currents of history, less a postmodernist pastiche than proof that modernism is still alive in the Spanish-speaking world.” —Publishers Weekly
"Long considered an “up-and-coming” writer by the Spanish critical press, Andrés Neuman (born in Buenos Aires in 1977 and raised in Granada, Spain) published two novels set in Argentina (‘Bariloche’ and ‘Una vez Argentina’) before his fourth novel (‘Viajero del siglo’) won Spain’s Alfaguara prize and caught the attention of English-language publishers. That book, published as ‘Traveller of the Century’, made its way into the British bookstores last month, and will soon be released in the US. Neuman, who has written poetry (‘No sé por qué’), short story (‘Alumbramiento’) and travelogue (‘Cómo viajar sin ver’), created in ‘Traveller of the Century’ a novel that is at once contemporary and historical: set in Restoration-era Germany, it discusses sexual mores and intellectual disputes in a distinctly modern way. Praise from writers like Roberto Bolaño long ago boosted his reputation in the Spanish-speaking world, but more than acclaim or ambition, it’s the clarity and grace of Neuman’s prose that has earned him high standing among fans. Now, English-language readers will have a chance to assess, and enjoy: check back here next month for an excerpt from ‘Traveller of the Century’ and interview with Neuman." - The Argentina Independent
"A WINTER’S NIGHT and the horses puff in the cold, while the coachman cracks his whip and Hans, the traveler inside, feels as if his teeth are chattering loose. “I-s the-ere mu-mu-ch f-f-urther t-oo g-oo?” he calls out to the driver, but though he can see a small city in the frozen air ahead it seems “to be moving in step with them, and getting no nearer.” It is a city that deserves its name: Wandernburg. Only when he closes his eyes does the town begin to approach, but when he opens them again it is to realize that this place will prove even harder to leave than it has been to enter.
Andrés Neuman’s ambitious book is the first of this young writer’s four novels to appear in English, and its opening pages announce a rather deceptive pedigree. A mysterious stranger arrives in an even more perplexing town, and is held there by something he does not understand. Not that Wandernburg lacks interest. The place comes complete: a German city of the old order with all the working parts, churches and cafes and a town hall made of “grandeur and gypsum.” It has its own class distinctions and local notables, its merchants and night-watchmen and a few down-and-outers, such as the nameless hurdy-gurdy man who soon becomes Hans’s friend. It even has its own criminal, a masked rapist who hunts at night, armed with a knife and a rope—a figure whom Neuman uses to give this loosely constructed book whatever suspense it has.
But Wandernburg does have one great peculiarity. Its streets and squares seem perpetually to change their location, and shops switch from one side of the lane to another, and Hans never finds himself able to take the same way twice. You will recognize Kafka here, and Calvino, and Kafka-in-Calvino, and maybe also the Kazuo Ishiguro of The Unconsoled. Your heart may sink. There are many pages on the road ahead, and the thought of them would be easier to bear if the innkeeper at Hans’s lodging were not called “Herr Zeit”—Mr. Time—and if Hans himself had a last name as well as a first. Even Josef had his K.
Yet be patient. This aspect of the novel seems imitative rather than allusive, but Neuman has other masters to draw on as well, and he discards all the mystification once it has done its necessary work and cut Wandernburg off from the world outside. He has other hands to help him, and the most interesting of them belong to the creator of another Hans.
For Wandernburg is a species of the Magic Mountain. Thomas Mann’s Hans Castorp had to go to the self-enclosed world of an Alpine sanatorium before he could talk about the fate of Europe and the course of its history. Neuman’s traveler does it in this “indeterminate” spot on the border between Saxony and Prussia, a town blown from one kingdom to the other with each shift of the political breeze. Mann’s character makes his journey in the years just before one great continental war; Neuman’s, just after an earlier one. The events of Kafka’s world may lie outside any explicit sense of history, but Traveler of the Century owes its final allegiance to a realist tradition, and can be placed firmly within it.
We are at the end of the 1820s. Goethe is still alive but the French Revolution is long over, the once-promising Napoleon is now a ghost, and the restored ancien régime is doing its best to hang on. This is Metternich’s Europe; but also that of the young dreamers known as Romantics. In Wandernburg Hans finds himself living in a Biedermeier world, presided over by a young woman named Sophie Gottlieb, who uses the movements of her fan—waving it languidly or snapping it shut—to control the conversation at her weekly salon.
Many of this novel’s best pages take place in and around that salon, pages in which a politically-assorted group of Wandernburg’s inhabitants talk through the issues of their times. Or maybe of ours. Sophie’s father, a city counselor, announces one evening that he considers the new German “customs union unwise … the small shopkeepers would end up being driven to the wall.” Some of his guests announce their belief in free trade, and Hans wonders who might “preside over … a Europe that would think like one country.” On other nights they speak of the relation between national sovereignty and individual freedom; they talk of Schopenhauer, the rights of women, and the degree to which one religion may “cohabit with any other creeds or denominations.” They argue about music, and often about books, in a way that allows Neuman to define his own purpose, making Hans suggest that the new historical fiction of Walter Scott must treat the past as a “laboratory in which to analyze the present.”
Good talk is seductive, and about halfway through the novel Hans’s tongue will do its work. Sophie has long been engaged to the vapid though athletic son of Wandernburg’s richest family, but this anachronistically forward girl still begins to slip into Hans’s room at the inn. At the same time the young man finally announces his hitherto hidden profession. He is a translator, comfortable in many languages, and familiar with the work of his century’s poets, from Coleridge to Leopardi to Pushkin. By now that metaphorical link between the traveler and the translator is a bit too well-worn, and thankfully Neuman does not push it very hard. What he does instead, as Hans’s and Sophie’s affair grows in lubricity, is to replace the salon’s discussions of Europe itself with a much tighter focus on the republic of letters. The cosmopolitan attention to politics narrows down to a concentration on the world of books, to a world united through, and perhaps only through, its literature.
For just around the time that Hans reaches for Sophie’s corset, the old Goethe turned in the real historical Weimar to his secretary Eckermann and said that “national literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of World-literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.” Those words have gotten a new currency in recent years, in an age of a globalized English and of writers such as Orhan Pamuk, who find so much of their audience in translation, and this book’s own oddities are both suggestive and attractive. Born in Argentina, Neuman has lived in Spain for much of his life, and Traveler of the Century might stand as an example of Goethe’s words, especially for those of us who must read it in this racily fluent translation: a Spanish-language love-song to German literature, in English.
Language and thought are inseparable, and translation impossible; yet those same thoughts are always and inescapably heterogeneous, our ideas never come from our own language alone, and translation is forever necessary. Or so Neuman suggests—but then so does any seminar. What makes this novel bigger than its ideas are the moments when his characters roll the different shapes and harmonies of the words themselves across their tongues. This is true above all of an extraordinary scene near the end. The first friend Hans makes in Wandernburg is the old organ-grinder, whom most of the city regards as little more than a beggar. But the man has seen everything over the years, and to Hans he stands as a guide to the way of the world. In the book’s last pages he fades into death, and as a last request asks Hans to tell him the name, in as many languages as he can, of the instrument on which he has built his life. Leierkasten, Drehorgel, organetto di Barberia, straatorgel, positiv, fataorgan, realejo, katarynka, barrel organ, hurdy-gurdy. All are different—and all the same.
Of course Neuman’s old man is himself an allusion. He is Der Leiermann, the “strange old organ grinder,” of Schubert’s sublime and desolate song-cycle, Die Winterreise, composed in 1827. This book comes stuffed with such references, a jumble sale of the past, and yet Neuman never indulges himself in the kind of ungrounded sampling that characterizes so much of our new world literature, in which allusiveness stands as its own justification and reward. He works always with a sense of purpose, at once political and aesthetic.
Traveler of the Century is too baggily long, and its narrative springs sometimes creak as it lumbers towards some resolution. Even the sex grows tiresome, inventive though it is. But there are moments here of exhilarating beauty, the talk commands attention, and even the melodrama of Wandernburg’s masked rapist offers both a creepy chill and a satisfying denouement. Andrés Neuman writes about history and literature and the relation between them with an intelligence that his American contemporaries cannot match. His first book in English must not be his last." - Michael Gorra
"One cold winter's night, Hans, a traveller and translator, arrives by coach in the fictional German city of Wandernburg, intending to break his journey en route to somewhere that actually exists on the map. With him he carries a mighty trunk, packed with books. "What have you got in there, a dead body?"asks the coachman. "Not one dead body," answers Hans, "several" – an answer that this novel proceeds to unpack.
Our hero takes lodgings in an inn, and the next day, walking around the town, befriends a mendicant organ grinder, who takes him to his cave in the idyllic countryside outside the city. Hans sups with the organ grinder and his dog, enjoying the sort of bucolic reverie familiar to poets of the early Romantic period. Returning to the town, he stays a second night and begins, almost by accident, to be drawn into its comfortable and bourgeois circle of socialites and intellectuals.
He falls in love with Sophie Gottlieb, the daughter of a local merchant. Alas, Sophie is betrothed to Rudi Wilderhaus, a local aristocrat and scion of the ancien régime. Those readers with even a fleeting knowledge of Schubert's song cycle Die Winterreise will already have cottoned on. Andrés Neuman, the Argentinian author, has translated Wilhelm Müller, author of the Winterreise poems, into Spanish.
But these hints towards a reconstruction of the beginnings of the Romantic movement are misleading. Although set in post-Napoleonic Germany, Traveller of the Century is by no means an historical novel. Its author has described it as a "futuristic novel that happens in the past, as science fiction rewound". It is, among other things, a romance, an adventure story, a survey of literature and politics in the 1820s, a pseudo-historical study of feminism, and a brilliant (although largely allegorical) analysis of Europe at the start of the 21st century.
Over the course of the book, we partake in magisterial synopses of literature and philosophy, and enjoy sparkling dialogues with the denizens of Wandernburg, a sleepy and conservative version of Fortress Europe, in which the geography will not stay still. Even the architecture is given to shifting behaviour, the church steeple "slanting perceptibly... as though it were about to topple forward."
Sometimes something stirs and shifts in the substrata of world literature: a book appears which has the potential to change what will follow. Sometimes it happens that people pick up on the ideas and emotions generated by that book and it becomes a classic; and sometimes it becomes instead a cult book enjoyed, or even revered, by a few, but never catching on with the many.
Traveller of the Century has already achieved impressive things for its young author in Spain and elsewhere, but this by no means guarantees its success in the litmus test of the English-speaking world, famously resistant to literature in translation. We cannot predict how this book will be received in the months and years to come, but there is little doubt in my mind that it deserves its place in the sun, as a work of true beauty and scintillating intelligence by a writer of prodigious talents. On the evidence of Traveller of the Century, we might well be convinced by Roberto Bolaño's much-vaunted prediction that the literature of the 21st century will belong to Neuman and a handful of his blood brothers. Whatever one's opinion of such elevated claims, books as stimulating, erudite and humane as this do not come along very often." - Richard Gwyn
"Literary smart talk and sexual desire are indivisible in Traveler Of The Century, the fourth novel from Argentina-born Spanish resident Andrés Neuman, and the first to be translated into English. In the late 1820s or early 1830s, translator Hans arrives in the small German town of Wandernburg with a weighty trunk, a beret, and no fixed departure date. A local councilor advises him early on to “abstain from offending the sensibilities of the authorities” with his headwear. “God willing he will leave and take his Voltaire with him before it is too late,” local priest Father Pig Herzog writes. But Hans’ rebellious views don’t get him into nearly as much trouble as his slow-burning flirtation with spunky proto-feminist Sophie Gottlieb, which turns into a full-blown affair.
Sophie is preparing to marry local gentry dullard Rudi Wilderhaus. One of her few outlets for intellectual sedition is a weekly Friday literary salon, where Hans regularly butts heads with Professor Mietter, a standard-bearer for reactionary but convincing arguments. “Romances use the past as a backdrop instead of as a starting point for reflection,” Hans announces at one of these sessions when denouncing historical novels. “Their plots rarely link passion and politics, or culture and feeling.” Neuman puts Hans’ precepts for engaging novels into practice: At 564 pages, Traveler is a heady, overtly ambitious work, its attitude best summed up by Hans’ dazed reaction to Sophie’s post-coital disquisition on Kant and her period: “Kant and menstruation, Hans reflected, why not?”
Traveler wears its ambitions lightly in spry prose, even as it none-too-subtly provides a forum for its characters to pose questions currently relevant to the European continent. “Our fate,” Hans declares, “also depends on that of the other European countries, you cannot define any nation without redefining the continent.” He’s arguing about how post-Napoleon Germany must think of itself, but the implications couldn’t be clearer. Equally blunt but effective is Neuman’s cast of characters, whose political and religious backgrounds are as (or more) significant as their dialogue. The exception is an unnamed organ-grinder who provides incisive folk wisdom about the nature of dreams and travel, a character who’s genuinely personable rather than just an obvious proletarian corrective to the salon’s social snobbery.
The sex+books=hotness equation is hardly a new one, but Neuman is a deft writer who earns his rare showy gestures, including an unbroken four-page finale written from the perspective of the wind. A much-cited quote from the late Roberto Bolaño deems Neuman one of the key forces to dominate “the literature of the twenty-first century”; this first English appearance bears out his endorsement." - Vadim Rizov
"Argentinean-born author Andrés Neuman has been racking up accolades in his adopted Spain since the tender age of 22, and “Traveler of the Century,” the first of his novels to be translated into English, reveals why the late Roberto Bolaño described the young writer as being “touched by grace.”
Set in the early 19th century, the story follows Hans, an itinerant philologist who stumbles into the German town of Wandernburg and finds it harder to leave than he expected. The streets of the little village have a peculiar, shifting quality that makes getting around difficult. It’s not the unusual layout that holds Hans back, however, but the people. The eponymous traveler falls in with two very different, but equally entertaining crowds. The first is a group of tramps led by a shabby organ grinder, who meet in a cave to drink and wax philosophical on life’s challenges. The other is a klatch of aristocrats and intellectuals who frequent a salon hosted by the beautiful Sophie Gottlieb. Her impetuous nature and impressive intellect quickly capture Hans’s interest, and the two engage in a protracted flirtation couched in lively discussions of art, poetry, music, and politics, so as not to arouse the suspicions of her fiancé, the well-meaning yet dull Rudi Wilderhaus.
In the organ grinder, Hans finds a mentor and, in a sly allusion to Franz Schubert’s “Die Winterreise,” a vision of what his future may hold should he continue to lead a rootless life that leaves him without a deeper connection to others. “I think that in order to know where we want to be,” says Hans, “we have to travel to different places, get to know things, people, learn new words.” The organ grinder gently prods him, “[I]s that traveling or running away?” It’s Sophie, however, who is able to open Hans’s eyes to the potential benefits of staying in one place. In her, he finds a smart, capable woman whose insightful repartee and proto-feminist worldview suggest the potential for a relationship built on mutual admiration and equality. He extends his stay in Wandernburg in the hopes of impressing her with his performances at the salon. Neuman draws out this restrained courtship so marvelously that when Sophie finally surprises Hans with a furtive kiss it’s utterly electrifying.
Their affair is one of the mind, as well as the body. Hans enlists her to help him translate poetry for a German publisher, both as a cover for their meetings and because he knows she will relish the opportunity to make use of the strong mind that she must otherwise mute in her role as a socialite. Neuman uses these encounters to dissect a wide variety of topics, everything from the ethics of censorship to, amusingly enough, the question of whether a translated work can ever really convey the sentiment of the original. Sophie and Hans complement one another, yet are in danger of being pulled apart; her by her obligation to her father and Rudi, he by the urge to keep moving.
All the while, Wandernburg moves around them. Neuman populates it with a well-developed cast of secondary characters that make the town feel truly alive, but never obscures the book’s main theme. “Traveler of the Century” takes on big ideas, and does so with an acuity that raises it to the level of great literature. It reminds us that the most satisfying journeys are the ones in which we allow ourselves to forget the destination. “[D]o you know what you have to do in order not to get lost in Wandernburg?” asks the organ grinder. “Always take the longest route.” - Michael Patrick Brady
"If you know that Andrés Neuman was born in Argentina, that he lives in Spain, where he has been awarded that country’s most prestigious literary prizes, and that Roberto Bolaño said, “the literature of the twenty-first century will belong to Neuman,” then Neuman’s first novel to be translated into English is not what you expect. Rather than a harsh tale about brutal Latin American atrocities or the underbelly of the Spanish-speaking world, Traveler of the Century takes place in Germany sometime in the mid-1800s. And indeed, it reads like a sprawling, nineteenth century European novel, more akin to Tolstoy than Bolaño.
It begins when Hans, a strange traveler wearing a Jacobean beret and peasant frock coat, who arrives in Wandernburg. It is the midst of winter, the River Nulte is frozen, the trees are bare, and the spires and towers of the town are topped with snow. Hans has been to many places, but never a place like Wandernburg.
This is partly due to the geographical position of Wandernburg, which is impossible to pinpoint on a map, since it changes places all the time, shifting between Saxony and Prussia, being part of the last Germanic lands owned by the Catholic Church. Moreover, the streets of Wandernburg themselves seem to change places. On his first day of wandering around, Hans loses his way in the “narrow, steep streets,” and often realizes that he has just walked in a circle. He believes the streets shifted during his first night, as the tavern he ate at the day before was then on the opposite side of the street.
The first friend he meets there is an old organ grinder, to whom he explains himself as “a sort of traveler, who journeyed from place to place, stopping off at unfamiliar destinations to discover what they were like, then moving on when he grew bored, felt the urge to travel again or found something better to do elsewhere.” Yet Hans stays in Wandernburg for much longer than he planned, because, as he tells the organ grinder, the city “won’t let me leave.” He books a coach to Dessau, misses it, books another, but meets Herr Gottlieb, a member of the town’s elite, whose daughter Sophie holds a salon every Friday. Gottlieb invites Hans to join the salon, and Hans finds himself making plans to leave every day, but watches the weeks go by, as he doesn’t want to miss the salon discussions, not to mention its host. Sophie is beautiful, educated, well trained in propriety, and quickly becomes the object of Han’s thoughts and desires. And she also happens to be engaged to the wealthiest bachelor in town.
The bulk of Traveler of the Century jumps around from one salon discussion to another, without a narrative note of interval. The salon participants conversations are also written in a scattered array of bursts of dialogue and reply, without quotations marks, in the same paragraph. Their discussions cover all the mid-19th century topics, comparing cultures of Germany, Spain, and France; the regression of the Old Order after the defeat of Napoleon and the progressive ideas of the Revolution; the repercussions of the Reformation, the Restoration, and the transformation to modernity; Hegel, Schlegel, and Kant looming in everyone’s comments. The Western world is on the edge of modernity, about to get rocked by Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, but we’re not there just yet.
Among very well mannered society wearing formal German dress, the beret-topped Hans is soon labeled as being “incapable of seeing beyond the most naïve materialism” and that he “reduces human knowledge to the empirical” as he hasn’t “gone beyond Hume.” And who has? Neuman knows that it’s impossible, and that we’re still operating in the paradigm that Hume developed. In fact, Neuman knows a lot, and he puts his knowledge into his novel, something which has become rare these days when authors are afraid of sounding pretentious.
As Hans stays through spring and summer, he gets a job translating poetry into German. After becoming “friends,” Sophie frequently joins him at the inn to “translate poetry,” and they develop into partners, having long discussions on the faithfulness of translating poetry, after or before having long bouts of wild sex. Rumors spread, and Wandernburgers begin to look at Hans with disdain. With her bold sexuality and independent thinking, Sophie pushes the boundaries of what is appropriate for females at the time, serving as a proto-feminist. Drifting daily from his cave where he sleeps to the market square where plays, the organ grinder serves as a sort of guru or holy man, dispensing words of wisdom and living his philosophy, rather than merely discussing philosophy, as Hans and the other salon attendees. Sophie’s fiancé is becoming suspicious, and violent. On top of everything, a rapist hides in the shadowy, shifting streets, a masked man who makes the Wandernburgers more xenophobic with each of his victims. Things don’t look good for Hans.
With Traveler of the Century, Andrés Neuman is able to turn back society to a time when the art of conversation was the most highly regarded form of entertainment, when gas lighting was a fancy innovation, when the only way to communicate with someone out of shouting distance was by a written note, and when the music of an organ grinder was enough to touch “the edge of something” or create “a slight tear in the fabric” — to capture what has been lost by progress. If you’re a lover of literature, history, poetry, philosophy, and love, then you will love reading Traveler of the Century." - The Coffin Factory
Andrés Neuman, Talking to Ourselves, Trans. by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia. Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Pushkin Press, 2014.
If you somehow managed to overlook the 2012 translation of Andrés Neuman’s breathtaking Traveler of the Century (and woe betide all whom continue to do so), you now have two exceptional works of fiction from the young Argentine virtuoso demanding your immediate attention.
Accolades aplenty have been piling up for Neuman since publishing his first novel (the as-yet untranslated Bariloche) at the age of 22: he was named to the illustrious Bogotá 39 list of outstanding young Latin American authors (sharing company with the likes of Daniel Alarcón, Junot Díaz, Eduardo Halfón, Santiago Roncagliolo, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, and Jorge Volpi, among others) and has been awarded both the Alfaguara and Spain’s National Critics prizes—and was twice a finalist for the Herralde Prize. Prestigious honors celebrating an already prodigious output—Neuman has authored some twenty works, including five novels, five books of short stories, nine collections of poetry (not including the volume that assembles a decade’s worth), a selection of aphorisms and literary essays, and a travel book about Latin America. Oh, and he translates poetry into Spanish. And writes a regular column. And maintains a very popular literary blog (which, unsurprisingly by now, was named one of the best in Spanish by an El cultural survey). All of this and yet he’s still a few years shy of his 40th birthday.
Roberto Bolaño, always the veritable critic, arbiter, and champion of literary prowess, in an essay entitled “Neuman, Touched by Grace” (collected in Between Parentheses), offered the following non-hyperbolic sentiment:
Among young writers who’ve already published a first book, Neuman may be the youngest of all, and his precocity, which comes studded with lightning bolts and proclamations, isn’t his greatest virtue. born in argentina in 1977, but raised in andalusia, andrés neuman is the author of a book of poems, Métodos de la noche Night Methods, published by Hiperión in 1998, and Bariloche, an excellent first novel that was a finalist for the most recent Herralde Prize.
The novel is about a trash collector in Buenos Aires who works jigsaw puzzles in his spare time. I happened to be on the prize committee and Neuman’s novel at once enthralled—to use an early twentieth-century term—and hypnotized me. In it, good readers will find something that can be found only in great literature, the kind written by real poets, a literature that dares to venture into the dark with open eyes and that keeps its eyes open no matter what. In principle, this is the most difficult test (also the most difficult exercise and stretch), and on no few occasions neuman pulls it off with frightening ease . . . When I come across these young writers it makes me want to cry. I don’t know whether a drunk driver will run them down some night or whether all of a sudden they’ll stop writing. If nothing like this happens, the literature of the twenty-first century will belong to Neuman and a few of his blood brothers.Talking to Ourselves (_Hablar solos), the second of Neuman’s books to be rendered into English, could not be more unlike its predecessor in translation—be it thematically or stylistically. Whereas Traveler of the Century was an epic novel of ideas, Talking to Ourselves is a far more intimate, personal work dealing with loss and mortality. There are no early-19th century self-rearranging german towns or cave-dwelling organ grinders to be found herein, but instead a small family forced to confront a reality teetering precariously upon the cusp of sorrow and uncertainty.
I wonder whether, perhaps without realizing it, we seek out the books we need to read. Or whether books themselves, which are intelligent entities, detect their readers and catch their eye. In the end, every book is the I Ching. you pick it up, open it and there it is, there you are.Set across an ambiguous landscape that appears to encompass both Spain and Latin America, Talking to Ourselves transcends geographical borders as easily as it does those of fidelity and compassion. Mario, afflicted with a cancer that brings him ever closer to death, sets out on (what he knows to be) a final road trip with his young son, Lito. staying behind is Mario’s wife, Elena, heartbroken over her family’s impending fate, yet able to find mild comfort within the pages of literature. With Mario’s illness looming, husband/father, wife/mother, and son are left to make sense of their inevitable realities however best they can—longing for intimacy and release, yet unable to overcome the emotional alienation imposed upon them by imminent dissolution.
“There’s a lot of horribleness [she] refuses to countenance,” I agree with what Helen Garner writes in one of her novels, “but it won’t just go away.” In fact the job of horror is to do the opposite: to resurface. “So somebody else has to sort of live it.” By avoiding the subject of death, Mario delegates it to me, he kills me a little. “Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose.” And feeds it. “It drives madness into the soul.” Like one truck driving into another. “It leaches out virtue.” Leaves it barren. “And makes a mockery of love.” And there are no more clean embraces. Here all of us fall ill.Told, in turns, from the perspective of each of the three main characters, Talking to Ourselves is, narratively speaking, a most ambitious effort. Alternating between Lito, Elena, and Mario, Neuman captures the distinction and nuance of these individual voices—inhabiting their inner worlds (in one form or another) to reveal fears, hopes, misgivings, doubts, and longings. Not only is each respective chapter told from the viewpoint of one of the three—each is also conveyed in a different format altogether: Lito’s excitable, curious, and impatient stream-of-thought expression befitting a 10-year old, Elena’s ongoing and forthright diary compositions, and Mario’s series of tape recordings to be left behind for Lito after his passing. Neuman’s stylistic choice works to magnificent effect (however arduous a task it must have been to pull off), as he easily transitions between voices and forms to reveal the thoughts and feelings that seem to so overwhelm each character, despite their inability to share openly with one another.
We all live in an ellipsis.While missing her husband and son terribly (and worrying incessantly about their well-being), Elena, per the fragility of her immediate existence, allows herself to be courted by Mario’s doctor—an affair that first excites, but later disgusts. As she records her daily interactions within her journal, she also discovers parallels within the books she reads (which include, it must be mentioned, the likes of César Aira, Margaret Atwood, John Banville, Roberto Bolaño, Anton Chekhov, Richard Ford, Javier Marías, Lorrie Moore, Flannery O’connor, Kenzaburō Ōe, Cynthia Ozick, Virginia Woolf, and others), excerpting them in her diary as if to corroborate her own interior state—or, at the least, to help make sense of its ceaseless tumult.
Work, work. That’s all I know how to do. You have to be very sad to hate vacations. You are so responsible, people tell me. They can go to hell. I look for things to be responsible for because I can’t be responsible for myself. Sometimes I think I don’t deserve to be a mother. Sometimes I think I had a child in order to stop myself from jumping out of the window. Sometimes I think I should have been the one who got ill. Sometimes I think about being fucked hard. Women who know what they want never want anything interesting.Foolish it would be for the reader to look for answers pertaining to the existential dilemmas of life and love. Talking to Ourselves considers a host of subjects, not the least of which being death, sickness, caretaking, parenthood and filial responsibility, devotion and infidelity, sex, passion, the duality of pleasure and pain, mourning, dishonesty, individual experience, and the inherent differences between men and women. If Neuman’s novel seems rich with life, it’s not only because his characters and their situations are so well-conceived, but also on account of his story being the stuff that life is so often composed of. To be sure, there are moments of tenderness, joy, and humor to be found throughout the book (especially when narrated by young Lito)—but Neuman’s capacity for unyielding compassion in the face of unflinching circumstance speaks volumes about the depths of his empathy and ability to synthesize through fiction the often unsettling realities and conflicting motivations of mortal existence.
When I see a couple kissing, believing they love one another, believing they will endure, whispering into each other’s ear in the name of an instinct to which they give lofty names, when I see them caressing one another with that embarrassing avidness, that expectation of discovering something crucial in the other’s skin, when I see their mouths becoming entangled, the exchange of tongues, their freshly showered hair, their unruly hands, fabric rubbing and lifting up the like the most sordid of curtains, the anxious tic of knees bouncing like springs, cheap beds in one-night hotels they will later remember as palaces, when I see two fools expressing their desire with impunity in broad daylight, as though I weren’t watching them, it’s not merely envy I feel. I also pity them. I pity their rotten future. And I get up and ask for the bill and I smile at them askance, as though I had returned from a war which the two of them have no idea is about to commence.With but a pair of works currently in translation, it is still rather evident that Andrés Neuman possesses a formidable talent. Talking to Ourselves, despite its solemnity (tempered though it may be by beauty and bittersweetness), is an exceptional work of considerable emotional breadth. While the story itself may well be dolorous, it radiates with an authenticity that can often be elusive in fiction. There’s a vibrancy and liveliness to Neuman’s writing (as well-evidenced, too, in Traveler of the Century) that is irresistible. Even if one were not captivated by his arresting tale, persuasive characters, or sonorous prose, the impassioned effects of his storytelling are inescapable.
Short of the inebriated automobiler who Bolaño feared might one day rob us of his wordsmithing savvy, the literature of our adolescent century may well indeed belong to Andrés Neuman (as well as Gonçalo Tavares, assuredly).
Enjoy life, do you hear?, It’s hard work enjoying life, and have patience, not too much, and look after yourself as if you knew you won’t always be young, even though you won’t know it and that’s okay, and have plenty of sex, son, do it for your sake and mine and even your mother’s, lots of sex, and if you have children, have them late, and go to the beach in winter, in winter it’s better, you’ll see, my head hurts yet I feel good, it’s hard to explain, and go traveling on your own once in a while, and try not to fall in love all the time, and care about your looks, do you hear me?, men who don’t care about their looks are afraid of being queer, and if you are queer, be a man, in short, advice isn’t much use, if you disagree with it you don’t listen, and if you already agree you don’t need it, never trust advice, son, travel agents advise you to go places they’ve never been, you’ll love more when you’re old, I thought of my father the moment we got down from that truck, our true love for our parents is posthumous, forgive me for that, I’m already proud of the things you’re going to do, I love the way you count the time on your fingers when you set the alarm clock, or do you think I don’t see?, you do it secretly, under the covers, so I won’t know you have difficulty working it out, I’m going to ask you a favor, whatever happens, whatever age you are, don’t stop counting the time on your fingers, promise me, octopus. - Jeremy Garber
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