Daniel Sada, Almost Never: A Novel, Trans by Katherine Silve. Graywolf Press, 2012.
This Rabelaisian tale of lust and longing in the drier precincts of
postwar Mexico introduces one of Latin America’s most admired writers to
the English-speaking world.
Demetrio Sordo is an agronomist who passes his days in a dull but remunerative job at a ranch near Oaxaca. It is 1945, World War II has just ended, but those bloody events have had no impact on a country that is only on the cusp of industrializing. One day, more bored than usual, Demetrio visits a bordello in search of a libidinous solution to his malaise. There he begins an all-consuming and, all things considered, perfectly satisfying relationship with a prostitute named Mireya.
A letter from his mother interrupts Demetrio’s debauched idyll: she asks him to return home to northern Mexico to accompany her to a wedding in a small town on the edge of the desert. Much to his mother’s delight, he meets the beautiful and virginal Renata and quickly falls in love—a most proper kind of love.
Back in Oaxaca, Demetrio is torn, the poor cad. Naturally he tries to maintain both relationships, continuing to frolic with Mireya and beginning a chaste correspondence with Renata. But Mireya has problems of her own—boredom is not among them—and concocts a story that she hopes will help her escape from the bordello and compel Demetrio to marry her. Almost Never is a brilliant send-up of Latin American machismo that also evokes a Mexico on the verge of dramatic change.
Demetrio Sordo is an agronomist who passes his days in a dull but remunerative job at a ranch near Oaxaca. It is 1945, World War II has just ended, but those bloody events have had no impact on a country that is only on the cusp of industrializing. One day, more bored than usual, Demetrio visits a bordello in search of a libidinous solution to his malaise. There he begins an all-consuming and, all things considered, perfectly satisfying relationship with a prostitute named Mireya.
A letter from his mother interrupts Demetrio’s debauched idyll: she asks him to return home to northern Mexico to accompany her to a wedding in a small town on the edge of the desert. Much to his mother’s delight, he meets the beautiful and virginal Renata and quickly falls in love—a most proper kind of love.
Back in Oaxaca, Demetrio is torn, the poor cad. Naturally he tries to maintain both relationships, continuing to frolic with Mireya and beginning a chaste correspondence with Renata. But Mireya has problems of her own—boredom is not among them—and concocts a story that she hopes will help her escape from the bordello and compel Demetrio to marry her. Almost Never is a brilliant send-up of Latin American machismo that also evokes a Mexico on the verge of dramatic change.
"Deliberately
tedious yet weirdly captivating, Sada's writing is a marvel. . . . A
strangely irresistible story of lust and tedium, Sada's final novel
rewards readers' patience."—Shelf Awareness for Readers
Almost Never—translated from Casa Nunca
by Katherine Silver—recalls the Spanish Baroque more than the Latin
American avant-garde. As in the plays of Lope de Vega, an intricate code
of honor shapes his novel's plot, and, as much as Luis de Gongora, Sada
revels in the labyrinths of preposterously convoluted prose. . . .
Demetrio's courtship of Renata is played out as Mexican kabuki that
makes a mockery of Puritanism, machismo and marriage."—Dallas Morning News
"Even when it's not explicitly about sex, Daniel Sada's Almost Never
has such a constant, manic, libidinous energy running through it that
even the day-to-day scenes of its hero city-hopping around Mexico in the
1940s feel like a sneaky kind of foreplay. The novel is a dispatch
straight from Sada's id. And thanks to its singular narrative voice, as
well as some stellar translation by Katherine Silver, it makes for a
bold first impression that English-language audiences won't soon
forget."—VUE Weekly
“[Sada] was one of the great
prose stylists from Mexico in the last half-century. He came, like
Renata, from the north, and his literary voice gyrates with a special,
uniquely Mexican cacophony, offering endless surprises even while
describing the quotidian. . . Almost Never [speaks] in a voice at
once worldly and provincial, [and] has been heroically and
astonishingly well translated by Katherine Silver.”—Ottawa Citizen
“[Sada] was one of the great
prose stylists to come out of Mexico in the last half-century. . . .
Francisco Goldman has described Sada as Joycean maximalist, which may
sound highfalutin but is not too far from dead-on. You don’t peruse
Sada; you plunge. . . . Here’s hoping that there is much, much more Sada
via Silver to come.”—Edmonton Journal
"Daniel Sada will be
remembered in Mexico as a literary titan of his time, one of the most
innovative novelists in contemporary Latin American letters. His books
stand in startling contrast to the persona: They are a whirling riot of
color, a wild cacophony of voices, an extravagant display of
pyrotechnical prose."—Washington Post Book World
Sada starts his novel with the word “Sex” and ends it with “Sheer relief,” and in between we find almost every variation on the theme.
Demetrio Sordo is an agronomist in Mexico in 1945, and he has an unbridled need to unleash his prodigious sexual appetite, especially when it comes to Mireya, a gorgeous prostitute with whom he falls half in love—and fully in lust. Because his job is rather boring, he finds he’s energized only when he’s visiting Mireya at the brothel. She fulfills his every sexual desire, and at first these consummations seem to provide Demetrio with a provisional, albeit carnal, happiness. But Demetrio’s sexual idyll is interrupted when he attends a wedding in northern Mexico and meets a very different kind of woman, the virginal Renata, who’s closely watched by her mother. Demetrio falls in love with Renata but finds his courtship abruptly truncated when he kisses (or “licks”) her hand, a sign of disrespect according to Renata’s madre. Then begins Demetrio’s dance between purity and desire, for while he wants Renata, he also wallows in sensuality with Mireya. When he finally makes up with Renata’s mother, she sets the date of the wedding a year away, primarily to make Demetrio suffer so that he will appreciate the special quality—let’s call it primness—of her daughter. The novel culminates with the long-delayed consummation of Demetrio’s wedding and honeymoon.
Sada writes lustily and with comic brio about Demetrio’s dilemma—but this is definitely not a book for the kiddies. - Kirkus Reviews
If you read only three novelists on Mexico — and you should read many more, but that’s your affair — choose Juan Rulfo, Roberto Bolaño and Daniel Sada. Rulfo cleared the way for magic realism with “Pedro Páramo,” published in 1955, a decade before the Boom. Bolaño, a Chilean whose great subject was Mexico, asserted that realism itself was magic enough to support a novel, and his gangs of visceral realists and killers bore him out. Meanwhile Sada, who died last year, reveled in wordplay and mimicry in his Joycean celebrations of Mexico’s cowboy north.
Roberto Bolaño considered Daniel Sada to be without rival among Mexican writers of their generation. Both were born in 1953. Bolaño spent his adolescence in Mexico, and even though some of his greatest novels and stories have Mexican settings, he never set foot there again after moving to Spain in his early twenties. I imagine that Bolaño must have relied, at least to some extent, on Sada’s novels—Sada’s perfect ear and exuberant re-creation of Mexican voices, the voices of the Mexican desert north especially—while writing his own Mexican masterpieces. Sada’s works were a polyphonic parade of voices, a Mexican cacophony: shouts, laughter, violent, lewd curses, sweet whispers, song.
“It was a place rarely visited, but attractive, four kilometers to the south of Sombrerete. There was a barranca whose abyss made you want to stop and contemplate it, and a cascade of crystalline water, thin and capricious.” So opens, modestly enough, Sada’s novel A la vista, published months before his death this year, on November 18. In the next sentence, Sada strikes a more characteristic note: “También había un ornato de árobles por doquier”—that ornato is a peculiar and Sada-esque word, impossible to translate, the whole phrase delicious to pronounce, though all it means, really, is that there were also a lot of trees around, and “a temperate year-round climate.” “The great thing about that place,” Sada goes on to write, “was that it was limited to the efficacy of words, as no photograph existed to give a more precise notion of the supposed marvel.” The description, the reader realizes by the end of the paragraph, is a set-up for a real estate scam. (As it turns out, there is no cascade, and no trees, only that abyss, and the climate.)
Bolaño compared Sada’s baroque writing style to Lezama Lima’s, by way of making the point that because the Cuban Lezama’s baroque reflected the crowded natural effulgence of the tropics, Sada’s baroque is a more impressive verbal invention, a baroque of the desert. It, too, came only from “the efficacy of words.” In Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe (Because it seems like a lie the truth is never known), Sada’s huge, dense masterpiece (a novel routinely referred to as Joycean, with 650 pages and 90 characters, narrated almost entirely in alexandrine, hendecasyllabic, and isosyllabic verse-prose), the desert and its sparsely populated towns teem with all the political turbulence, corruption, and violence of modern Mexico. Sada is to Juan Rulfo—author of only one, hundred-page novel, the Mexican desert ghost-town masterpiece Pedro Páramo, voted by readers of Spain’s most important newspaper, El País, as the greatest Spanish-language novel of the twentieth century—what Beckett was to Joyce, only inverted. Beckett’s minimalism was his response to Joyce unsurpassable maximalism. Sada’s maximalism was his response to Rulfo’s unsurpassable minimalism.
Sada was touring around Mexico with Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe when we met, about twelve years ago. Martin Solares was his editor at Tusquets Mexico and also wore a publicist’s hat. In one of those acts of crazy generosity that typify Martin, but that also seem to occur nowhere else but Mexico, he invited me along on the stretch of tour stopping in Culiacan and Mazatlan. Sada was a monumental storyteller, and I remember many of the tales he told us over those few days. One was about working, when he was younger and new to the city, as a butcher in Mexico City’s labyrinthine old downtown market. Another was about a job he had driving a minivan for a convent of nuns. Sada, unsurprisingly, was a great mimic. He told us that the novelist Salvador Elizondo once made a newspaper photographer who was taking his picture include his pet parakeet in the shot because Elizondo wanted, later, to be able to hold the newspaper up to the bird and say—Sada’s imitation of Elizondo’s nasal drawl is still vivid in my ear—“Look, perico, you’re in the newspaper.” Sada had taken a fiction workshop taught by none other than Juan Rulfo. That led to my favorite story. The agonizingly shy Rulfo had somehow been convinced to accept a great honor in China. He was to change planes in San Francisco. There he sat at the departure gate watching fellow passengers board the flight to China but decided not to join them. He just sat there and didn’t tell anybody. In Peking, the official Chinese and Mexican delegations and the press waited on the airport tarmac.
Sada looked like a stereotypical butcher: a chunky, rugged, prematurely balding man. He grew up in a northern Mexico desert town of a thousand inhabitants. I used to sense in Sada—and identify with, thinking of New York counterparts—an insecurity and discomfort around the urbane, supremely self-confidant Mexico City literary types, all those Letras Libres and “Crack” writers who dressed and comported themselves, as my late wife, Aura, once remarked, “like international bankers.” Sada had a beautiful face, with a proud forehead, a sensuous mouth, and long, narrow eyes that used to make me think of Japanese scroll paintings of samurai.
It was devastating to watch his kidney disease slowly waste him, as if he were imprisoned in fast-forwarding time. Over the past few years, I’d been struggling with my own trauma, the death of my wife, and so I shied away from seeking him out, preferring, whenever I was in Mexico, to wait to run into him at the Pendulo bookstore café or elsewhere in our neighborhood. I always encountered the same incredibly sweet, generous man, quick with a kind word. The last time we spoke he asked me at least twice what I thought of the English title of his novel Casi Nunca, which will soon be published by Graywolf as Almost Never. I told him that I thought it was great. Sada read everything. He was full of praise for a writer from Mexico’s north, the young Yuri Herrera. And he told me that he thought Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, published by Martin Solares at Almadía press, was the best book that the wonderful Oaxaca-based independent press had produced in the past year.
Solares, a close friend of Sada’s, sent me this reminiscence and reflection, which, with apologies, I’ve translated: “He woke every morning well ahead of his occupations. If he was inspired, or finishing a book, he’d jump out of bed at four-thirty in the morning and write until sunrise before starting in on his other work. He wasn’t interested in luxury or power, though his prose is a true luxury. Nobody could write the way he could. In life, he only ever boasted about one thing: his way of writing. To the students who took his writing workshops, he gave one of the simplest but most valuable pieces of advice: in literature there are no excuses. You have to organize your life to be able to write at least a half a page every day. After a week, you’ll have enough words to finish a story, after a month enough for a novella, after a year enough for a novel or a collection of stories … Some of his first novels were written under great economic duress, but they are among his best: Una de dos, Albedrío. It took him six years to write his most ambitious novel, amid personal upheaval and much moving around, but he never lost his energy or concentration … His last two novels were completed despite his illness, in heroic conditions: dictated to his wife, the great Adriana Jiménez, without any sacrifice of style. Do I need to say that El lenguaje del juego, still unpublished, is extraordinary? In barely one hundred pages, just a little more than Pedro Páramo, Sada has bequeathed us his dazzling personal explanation of Mexican violence … Thinking it over, I realize that all his books reinforce this conviction: literature is a voice that emerges out of the dark, and that seeks to relate fascinating acts in a unsurpassable style … [This voice] is obligated to search through the most antiquated Spanish along with the speech of the streets, choose whatever works, and with that create the story, in verses that astonish or make us smile on the darkest of days.” - Francisco Goldman
Sex is the first word and ironic driving force of Daniel Sada’s Almost Never. It is the activity the agronomist Demetrio Sordo decides upon to break up the monotony of nightly strolls, cups of coffee, and games of dominos. The only way this can work, he decides, is if he partakes every 24 hours, and so he goes to the red-light district where he meets Mareya, a prostitute who falls for him. Soon he is in the small town of Sacramento for a wedding, though, where he sees and covets Renata, the last virgin daughter of an upstanding family. The novel can be broken down as a farcical takedown of the macho and the pastoral, as a fun play on the oldest dichotomy—virgins and whores—and it is those things, but Sada’s senses of rhythm and humor elevate it. They dust off these old tropes and present them anew.
Almost Never, originally published as Casi Nunca in 2008, has been translated by Katherine Silver, who’s done exceptional work on Horacio Castellanos Moya and César Aira. Before his death in November of last year, Sada published nine novels, eight short-story collections, and three books of poetry. He was a student of Juan Rulfo’s, and is viewed as the maximalist counter to Rulfo’s extreme minimalism. Though Sada is most lauded in the Spanish-speaking world for his 1999 novel Porque parece mentira, la verdad nunca se sabe, which was written in various meters, this is his first novel to be translated into English. It was not written in meter, but its structurally fascinating rhythm is pushed forward by Sada’s poetic use of colons, em-dashes, and ellipses to stop and propel the action, enacting Demetrio’s back-and-forth.
Self-sacrificing
but conniving mothers and mother figures, thieving members of the lower
class, pimps with guns—this is Demetrio’s world, even as global change
is happening. When his landlady attempts to discuss news of the bomb
dropped on Hiroshima, he gives her a nihilistic brush-off and we move on
to the mechanics of his next lay. These are small lives that Sada seems
to relish blowing up, in a manner akin to Manuel Puig. For both these
writers, the objective is to act as an unseen voyeur, bringing humor and
unmatched style to the ordinary. Whereas Puig excels at understanding
and enacting the feminine, Sada takes a far more masculine approach; he
tears down bravado even as he clearly deeply understands its motives and
origins. He doesn’t go deep within interior lives, but stands to the
side like a bemused bystander.
Almost Never is the late Daniel Sada’s first novel to be translated into English, brought to the Anglophone reading public here through Katherine Silver’s excellent translation. The novel was originally published in 2008 as Casi Nunca, and won Sada the Premio Herralde for that year, an award given out by the well known Editorial Anagrama. Sada was widely recognized as one of the most important and truly creative writers of his generation; just hours before his death in November of last year at age 58, he was awarded his native Mexico’s Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes.
In Almost Never, we follow Demetrio Sordo on a sexual picaresque through the Mexican countryside of the mid-1940s. Demetrio is a youngish agronomist with good prospects — so good that he decides to indulge his lust and personal economic surplus in a little commercial sex at a nice brothel. Demetrio is enchanted and soon enamored of an “exuberant” whore named Mireya. We are treated to vivid and usually repulsive accounts of the “screwing,” for which Demetrio pays increasingly excruciating rates. Not long after, Demetrio travels to the country to accompany his mother to a family wedding — “As you know, because of my age and infirmities, I couldn’t possibly attend such an event alone…” writes the exacting lady — where he meets Renata, refulgent virgin swathed in the moral strictures of rural upper-middle class Catholicism. Demetrio quickly finds himself trying to make sense of his lower and higher urges (mostly lower) in anxious, calculating vacillation between the virgin and the whore, those two irresistible productions of the macho fantasy. The expected difficulties ensue.
Sada has been compared to Joyce and Lezama Lima, among others. There are echoes of Joseph Heller, too, in the deadpan absurdity of the characterizations. Most delightful is Sada’s narrative style: choppy, rhythmic, the voice of the narrator is always amused, always prodding, expanding and retracting its scope. Of note is Sada’s wonderfully unorthodox use of the colon: “And the only thing they, as well as the other passengers, saw at any given moment was a sprinkling of the rails: the one on the left: where: unwanted kisses: liquid moderation, which outside observers might have perceived as flotation.” Punctuation is at its best here, serving the needs of sound, motion, and impression.
The whole novel consists of this kind of unorthodox craftsmanship of language. The narrative is a constant negotiation with the reader. On a funeral: “We won’t talk much about the burial. This synopsis should suffice: there was a chorus of cries, over-the-top good-bye clamors. We’d rather mention certain events that occurred during the short respites from the break.” Describing a meal: “All four got along during the meal, which was delicious. Better not to list each thing they ate so as not to make the narrative too bourgeois, but it was all delicious.” If ever there were good reason to hurl that nauseating workshop dictum Show, don’t tell! out a window, it would be Sada’s playful interpretation of surface description. Sada’s narrator turns description into its own drama, its own comedy — an event worthy of our readerly attention. Here again is a moment to appreciate Katherine Silver’s surpassing translation. The book teems with Sada’s voice and spirit.
Almost Never is like a comedy of manners cut with a pulpy erotic novel, a social satire impelled by a dripping lecherousness. Most of all, it’s a fantastic, exciting book. - Alli Carlisle
During his lifetime, the Mexican novelist Daniel Sada was regarded as the most committed avant-gardist of his generation. A native of Sacramento, in the border state of Coahuila—during his youth a town of a thousand people—he countered the urban fiction of Mexico City’s generación del crack with stories set in the ranches and villages of the northern desert. The austerity of his subjects was matched by the extravagance of his forms. He made his reputation with Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe (1999, “No one ever knows the truth because it looks like a lie”), a 650-page chronicle of electoral fraud written entirely in the meters of the Spanish Golden Age. Some called it the most difficult novel ever to come out of Mexico, and compared it to Joyce and Faulkner in its scope. Closer to home, Sada was said to recall Juan Rulfo (a onetime teacher) in his subject matter, and José Lezama Lima in his baroque technique.
Sada died of kidney disease in November 2011, days after receiving Mexico’s National Prize for Arts and Sciences. The best-regarded book of his later years was Casi nunca (2008), now appearing in English as Almost Never. A far more accessible work than its predecessors, it shows considerable relaxing of ambition. The style is still highly worked, but the plot is broad comedy edging onto farce. The Second World War has just ended, and Demetrio Sordo, a young agronomist of inconsistent ambitions and robust appetites, is visiting brothels for the sheer novelty of sex on demand. He develops a passion for the prostitute Mireya, who believes that Demetrio will rescue her from her situation; but a family obligation takes him north to Sacramento, where he conceives an attraction—described in plain carnal terms—for the virginal, green-eyed Renata Melgarejo. Mireya decides to falsely tell Demetrio she is pregnant. Demetrio decides to abandon Mireya on a train. Renata’s mother decides that Demetrio must be put through circuitous sufferings. And so forth, all in a calculatedly playful telling that is less Lezama Lima than Cabrera Infante. Sex appears for the sake of sex, and style for the sake of style.
The novel begins with a catalog—“Sex, as an apt pretext for breaking the monotony; motor-sex; anxiety-sex; the habit of sex”—which winds around to the protagonist, his erotic resolution and his first brothel visit, all casually introduced in the middle of a paragraph as if they had grown out of the opening abstractions rather than the other way round. This is a poetic more than a fictional logic; though Sada no longer writes paragraphs in meter, he is still drawing his forms from distant sources. Much of his singularity lies in a particular mock-epic narrative voice, sardonic but not malevolent, that peppers the book with exclamations, alliterations and internal rhymes, and sometimes generates plot events on the fly. An awkward conversation between Demetrio and his mother, which, the narrator observes, ought to be set in a precarious rowboat, turns out to summon that rowboat by way of a flood. A group of ranch mechanics is inflated to “peons dextrous in the automotive arts,” or in the even more baroque original, peones . . . muy duchos en lo concerniente a las artes de la mecánica automotriz. Katherine Silver’s translation is deft with faux high style; more treacherous is the opposite register of Mexican slang. Órale, vamos a ensartarnos, with its suggestion of physical skewering, isn’t quite “Hey, you, let’s get it on”; nor is una puta llena de mierda simply “a lowdown whore.” Generally the translation balances such difficulties with a spirit of invention much in keeping with Sada’s own. The ubiquitous !Vaya! is once rendered as “Kerplunk!”
The amorous plot, where it is not purely libidinal, ambles its way through a comedy of provincial manners. Its length derives in part from the slowness with which Demetrio must court Renata under the mores of Sacramento, a town the narrator wryly calls “a world cultural center superior to, let us say, Luxembourg.” The material aspects of the place—the dust, the difficulty of bathing—are memorable, and the scenes of hardship in the more remote desert, where Demetrio’s lack of foresight strands him more than once, are among the best things in the book. The comedy of courtship also has well-drawn touches, as when Renata and her mother repeatedly postpone Demetrio’s visits for days at a time because they are “not presentable” at any given hour. For his part, Demetrio is mostly a passive prop in the marriage negotiations. His name combines one of Shakespeare’s comic lovers with the Spanish word for “deaf,” and his perceptions never extend far past his own lust, except to fasten on the substitute desire for material gain. Alongside the courtship comes his erratic, somewhat surprising transformation into a man of means, first by plying his trade of agronomist on ranches and then, more successfully, by sinking family money into a billiards hall. Mexico is industrializing—from time to time the narrator reminds us how backward are the roads, the plumbing, the communications services, compared to what is coming—and a young man with luck and modest resources may go far indeed.
In a late interview, Sada said that he had once wanted to write an epic poem that was also a nineteenth-century novel, but that he later renounced that ambition as impossible. To read Almost Never as a nineteenth-century novel would be to find it ending after the first act. Its goal is not to show the outcome of Demetrio’s striving, as an older realism would have done, nor to provide, in the manner of the Boom, an exemplary origin story for Mexico. The question, then, is what the book is actually about. Most definitely it is about sex. But for all its verve, sex in Almost Never remains a curiously empty signifier. Sada is not especially interested in opposing hedonic nature to repressive society—a brothel, after all, is a highly social institution—nor does he follow the antic combinatorics of Joyce’s obscenity. Some Latin Americans have written machismo upside down, as when 2666 set its hard-boiled exploits against a background of serial rape and murder, but Almost Never is much cooler in its judgments. Its closing pages reduce sex to pure formalism, and having reached this endpoint, one is inclined to think that form has been the point all along. Like the billiard games that make Demetrio’s money, sex is a mechanical operation shot through with the potential for lyric. Only a true lover of language could take such an approach to writing and still make it read like a seduction.-
He seemed an unremarkable man, poking through Mexico City’s bookstores, his round face notable only for its eternally squinting gaze. He was seen now and then in the literary cafes of La Condesa, where artists hunch over endless rounds of espresso, trading news from imagination’s frontiers.
He was squat, thick, stocky. You might have taken him for a steelworker if not for the ink-stained fingers, the satchel over his shoulder, filled to bursting with musty tomes. Yet, for all the shyness, the unexceptional face, the virtual anonymity, Daniel Sada will be remembered in Mexico as a literary titan of his time, one of the most innovative novelists in contemporary Latin American letters. His books stand in startling contrast to the persona: They are a whirling riot of color, a wild cacophony of voices, an extravagant display of pyrotechnical prose. Before his death in November at the age of 58, Sada seemed poised to win every laurel the Spanish-language literary community had to offer. Roberto Bolano had pronounced him without rival among authors of his generation; Carlos Fuentes had called him a revelation for the world.
Sada was, without a doubt, a writer’s writer. Like Faulkner or Joyce or David Foster Wallace, he produced rich, dense, diabolically difficult novels — some written in octosyllabic and hendecasyllabic meter, all punctuated with a set of bizarre rules. But the rewards, for anyone in love with the Spanish language, were legion. These were gargantuan masterpieces, clear rejoinders to the stark, minimalist work of Juan Rulfo, whose “Pedro Paramo” had dominated the Mexican literary landscape for more than half a century. They stood in clear contrast, too, to thin, bleak novels by young Mexican writers of the Crack Movement, who fought hard to distance themselves from Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Mario Vargas Llosa or Julio Cortazar and then self-destructed in the fray. Just as Sada’s weird, culturally incorrect novels began to be noticed — just as Mexico conferred on him its most coveted national prize — a renal malady took him. And so we are left with the Sada we have.
For Spanish-language readers, it is a splendid accumulation. There are short stories in profusion, enough poems to keep scholars scratching their heads for decades and 10 novels — among them the colossal “Because It Seems So False, the Truth Will Never Be Known,” a fierce, unforgiving portrait of the chaos and corruption of modern Mexico.
For English-language readers, alas, we have but one volume, and it is this translation of “Almost Never,” a valiant effort by Graywolf Press to offer up Sada’s most accessible novel only months after the great man’s death.
I say “valiant” because I admire Graywolf’s resolve to bring a brilliant Mexican writer to the attention of American readers. I say “effort” because the translation fails spectacularly to deliver anything like Sada’s wonderfully wacky prose.
Here, in “Almost Never,” is a bumptious story about sexual obsession that well might appeal to any sentient human being with a few nerve ends and a beating heart. Demetrio, a young agronomist in Oaxaca — it is 1945, in a vibrant metropolis of Mexico — falls in love with a beautiful and inexhaustibly athletic prostitute by the name of Mireya. He is gleefully enjoying her countless charms, visiting her so often that she has no time for other customers, when his mother writes and insists that Demetrio accompany her to a wedding in the desert town of Coahuila. At the wedding, he meets the virginal Renata, whose beauty is so arresting that he cannot help but propose marriage. Although Renata accepts, she is not so easily won. There is to be no touching, she tells him, and certainly no conjugating. Not even a whisper of love, for at least a year. But Demetrio is full of vim and vigor — this is post-World War Mexico, after all, and the country is bursting with possibility. So it’s back to Mireya. And then forth to Renata. And then back, forth, back. You get the picture.
So far: the man-woman thing? It’s a well-worn tale. Hapless hedonist is made to choose between chaste and carnal. All the same, in its Spanish iteration, the story is funny, impish, bawdy, headily reminiscent of Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones” — and it’s written with a prose that never falters. Demetrio tries mightily, if not heroically, to rid himself of Mireya, even as he labors to meet the imperatives of a harsh fiancee. As we shuttle across the Mexican desert with him, a whole country and people come to life.
In “Almost Never,” in other words, we see a writer in full maturity, a master in control of his craft. No need for polysyllabic meter. No need to gild the goose. -
In a society that represses sex, the people are ruled by a desire for it to an absurd degree. That is the primary lesson of Almost Never, author Daniel Sada’s comic novel about the quest of Demetrio to wed, so he can bed, Renata, a beauty from a dusty Mexican town in the last ‘40s. “Sex” is the first word in the book; “sheer relief” are its last.
Demetrio begins his journey in Oaxaca where he holds a steady, promising job as a agronomist. His income is regular, as his sex life. (He is a consistent customer of a prostitute named Mireya.) During a visit to the town of Sacramento with his mother, he spies Renata, whom he immediately desires and decides to marry. This necessitates a lengthy courtship process, during which he briefly runs away with and then abandons Mireya in a fit of frustration and then moves to his aunt’s house in Sacramento in order to be closer to Renata.
Traveling in Mexico, in this time before widespread paved roads, is described as an “exhausting trek”, but everything in this society is an exhausting trek. Renata’s mother controls the courtship process in the most painstakingly slow method possible dictated by a series of arcane and absurd rules. When Demetrio impulsively licks Renata’s hand while kissing it, this serious affront sets him back for months. (The second of the “allocutions” that Renata must follow “concerns the filthy nature of all things carnal, meaning that the beau should never dare kiss any part of the beloved’s body, for kisses in general led to the worst of perversities.”)
Demetrio funnels his thwarted energy towards making money. In these endeavors this society dictates that what is normally considered “sinful” can be glossed over in the interest of material success and he eventually makes his fortune in pool halls. Starting with Mireya, sex and money become increasingly intertwined and Demetrio.
Sada’s satiric aims are directed both at Demetrio’s character and the Mexican society that shapes it, both of which are responsible for his boyishness. Almost Never is often about horniness, the pubescent desire to have an urge satisfied immediately and being stifled at every step. Demetrio appears to be calmest and happiest at the beginning, with a regular income and regular sex. But even then there is always desire for the release that something else—more money, more sex—might be able to provide.
The most clearly defined sexual roles in this world are that of an immature macho man and his preening, protective mother. Both are equally maudlin in their conceptions and both support each other in their neediness. Sada has a lot of fun with the depiction of Demetrio’s Aunt Zulema, another sexually stymied soul who lost a chance with her childhood beau years ago. She attempts to compensate by taking on a warped role for Demetrio and in one of the funniest scenes, she convinces him to let him adopt her as a second mother:
“Okay, I understand what you are proposing… It’s just that for me it’s important to know what being my second mother means to you.”
“Only that you may live in this house whenever you want; only that when I die you will own it.”
A barely concealed sexual tension exists between them; they frequently linger over affectionate kisses for too long.
The mothers help Demetrio decode the arcane traditions governing Renata and her mother and the courtship process. They in turn seem to derive some sort of energy from assisting him in reaching his goal, confirming that he is “good” and that life continues in its proper place.
Sada’s greatest innovation is in his unique stream of conscious style by a third person narrator, who is removed and wry, sometimes trying to capture the interior thoughts in a comical manner. Sada employs heavy use of punctuation to create a rhythmic effects that mirror the stuttering starts and stops of a rambling mind: “In this sense it’s worth emphasizing the vague indifference of he who stared resolutely out the bus window (what might the scatterings in the fields evoke), then turned, like a ghoulish cat, to look at the belly of the pregnant woman… And after that—alas! where precisely should he turn: to the north, the east, the west, straight down the middle, or where…The border, the state of Tamaulipas—yes?”
Sada died in 2011 and his works are now finally being translated into English. His experiments in style and the unique combination of effects in language and punctuation, most likely explain how long it has taken for his works to be translated. Almost Never, which received the Herralde Prize for Spanish literature in 2008, would seem like the ideal place to start. (Graywolf Press is also smartly trumpeting an endorsement from Roberto Bolaño with its release.)
The experimentation in language is largely successful in creating a disjointed, satiric view of a shallow immature man, yet the mocking of a distinctly Mexican and dated style of maudlin masculinity left me a bit cold. Still this is an extraordinary, wittily crass book. - Michael Buening
Almost Never begins and ends immersed in sex. Its protagonist, Demetrio Sordo, is torn by sex: on the one hand there is Mireya, a whore at the local brothel that he is swept away by and whom he is soon visiting six days a week; on the other hand there is the ultra-prim and proper Renata, whom he begins to woo and who snares him in an extremely drawn-out -- and hands-off -- courtship.
The novel is set in Mexico, and begins in 1945. Demetrio, not yet thirty, is an agronomist -- the "administrator and principal agricultural expert" at a huge orchard. It is on a trip to his mother's distant hometown that he meets Renata. He is drawn to her, even though she demands a certain distance and formality be kept -- but then Demetrio lives so far away that it would be difficult to rush things anyway.
Renata, the youngest in a group of daughters, and the only one not yet married, wants to follow in her sisters' footsteps and escape from her mother, but she also takes her mother's lessons about men to heart. It's been drilled into her that they have to be teased along, made to suffer before any of their base desires are fulfilled. Indeed, even when Demetrio and Renata are already engaged she maintains a reserve:
"I love you, Renata. Let me at least hug you."
"No, not even that. Things have to be done properly."
"But no one is watching us. Come on !"
"Remember, I was well brought up, and it makes no difference whether anybody is watching us ... God is."
For a while things go well enough in Demetrio double-life, between his constantly available whore and the woman he is wooing but only sees very rarely. But Mireya has her own plans for the future, too, and wants to escape the brothel, and when she sets her little plan in action it upsets Demetrio's world, too.
Demetrio moves on -- to new jobs and opportunities -- but has some difficulty settling down, in no small part because Renata, that "obedient automaton", still insists on proceeding ever so slowly. So it continues:
Sada starts his novel with the word “Sex” and ends it with “Sheer relief,” and in between we find almost every variation on the theme.
Demetrio Sordo is an agronomist in Mexico in 1945, and he has an unbridled need to unleash his prodigious sexual appetite, especially when it comes to Mireya, a gorgeous prostitute with whom he falls half in love—and fully in lust. Because his job is rather boring, he finds he’s energized only when he’s visiting Mireya at the brothel. She fulfills his every sexual desire, and at first these consummations seem to provide Demetrio with a provisional, albeit carnal, happiness. But Demetrio’s sexual idyll is interrupted when he attends a wedding in northern Mexico and meets a very different kind of woman, the virginal Renata, who’s closely watched by her mother. Demetrio falls in love with Renata but finds his courtship abruptly truncated when he kisses (or “licks”) her hand, a sign of disrespect according to Renata’s madre. Then begins Demetrio’s dance between purity and desire, for while he wants Renata, he also wallows in sensuality with Mireya. When he finally makes up with Renata’s mother, she sets the date of the wedding a year away, primarily to make Demetrio suffer so that he will appreciate the special quality—let’s call it primness—of her daughter. The novel culminates with the long-delayed consummation of Demetrio’s wedding and honeymoon.
Sada writes lustily and with comic brio about Demetrio’s dilemma—but this is definitely not a book for the kiddies. - Kirkus Reviews
If you read only three novelists on Mexico — and you should read many more, but that’s your affair — choose Juan Rulfo, Roberto Bolaño and Daniel Sada. Rulfo cleared the way for magic realism with “Pedro Páramo,” published in 1955, a decade before the Boom. Bolaño, a Chilean whose great subject was Mexico, asserted that realism itself was magic enough to support a novel, and his gangs of visceral realists and killers bore him out. Meanwhile Sada, who died last year, reveled in wordplay and mimicry in his Joycean celebrations of Mexico’s cowboy north.
Sada is already a cult figure among Spanish speakers. Bolaño’s
appreciation of his writing (“of my generation . . . the most daring”)
is splashed across the cover of the new English translation of his 2008
masterpiece, “Almost Never.” The novel concerns a 29-year-old agronomist
and sex enthusiast, Demetrio Sordo, who works at an orchard on the
outskirts of Oaxaca. Bored, he begins to frequent a high-class bordello,
where he falls in love with a “spectacular whore” named Mireya, putting
the proprietors on edge. “Such unhealthy devotion was causing universal
unease at the Presunción: this was the first time in its history a
client had come to sin as punctually as he went, with intrepid daily
devotion, to his job.” Mireya latches on to Demetrio as an escape from
the brothel, but circumstance and an uncompromising madam conspire
against them. Her rate rises vertiginously.
Then, on a trip to a wedding in a dusty northern town, Demetrio meets
the starchy Renata. He falls in love with her, too, and courts her
through letters. It is 1945: modernity and Hiroshima try to elbow in on
Demetrio’s consciousness, but he’s busy pursuing the ladies. An
intractable love triangle ensues, in a satire of machismo run amok. As
events force Demetrio to choose between the women, the plot takes a turn
toward the outrageous. There are holdups in the red-light district and
midnight flights with suitcases full of cash. There are faked
pregnancies. There are uptight landladies and prostitutes who turn
prints of “The Last Supper” around to face the wall before commencing
their work. There is an overabundance of sex in all forms: anxious sex,
joyful sex, furtive sex, martyred masturbation.
What is so daring here? It’s not Sada’s depiction of the Madonna-whore
complex, nor his take on the delusions of a Mexican macho — although
both make for delicious burlesque. What’s new is the voice, and Sada’s
glorious style. Katherine Silver pulls off the near-impossible feat of
translating the cacophony of thoughts, interjections and slang rattling
around Demetrio’s fevered brain, not to mention the continual asides of
an arch narrator. Here is Demetrio attempting to write his first letter
to Renata: “He couldn’t decide whether to write ‘Highly esteemed,’
‘Dear,’ ‘Wondrous’ or simply, ‘Hi, Renata,’ or the name by itself, next
to a drawing of a flower, using five colored pencils. No! Such
vulgarity, quickly shunned. . . . Nonetheless, try, try, try again,
knowing that sheer obstinacy would carry him to his goal, whatever that
might be, which might provoke stentorian laughter that was nonetheless
sympathetic.” Demetrio’s surname means “deaf,” and he’s fittingly
oblivious. Still it’s impossible not to be swept along by Sada’s manic
language, his Cervantean plot twists and his affection for the hero who
shares his initials; and so we root for Renata’s swift reply.
While “Almost Never” is the more straightforward book, the author’s
reputation really rests on a 1999 novel called “Porque Parece Mentira la
Verdad Nunca se Sabe” (“Because It Seems a Lie the Truth Is Never
Known”). Given its 650 pages, 90 characters and use of archaic metric
forms like alexandrines, hendecasyllables and octosyllables, translation
represents quite a hurdle. If only Katherine Silver would take it on.- Rachel Nolan
Roberto Bolaño considered Daniel Sada to be without rival among Mexican writers of their generation. Both were born in 1953. Bolaño spent his adolescence in Mexico, and even though some of his greatest novels and stories have Mexican settings, he never set foot there again after moving to Spain in his early twenties. I imagine that Bolaño must have relied, at least to some extent, on Sada’s novels—Sada’s perfect ear and exuberant re-creation of Mexican voices, the voices of the Mexican desert north especially—while writing his own Mexican masterpieces. Sada’s works were a polyphonic parade of voices, a Mexican cacophony: shouts, laughter, violent, lewd curses, sweet whispers, song.
“It was a place rarely visited, but attractive, four kilometers to the south of Sombrerete. There was a barranca whose abyss made you want to stop and contemplate it, and a cascade of crystalline water, thin and capricious.” So opens, modestly enough, Sada’s novel A la vista, published months before his death this year, on November 18. In the next sentence, Sada strikes a more characteristic note: “También había un ornato de árobles por doquier”—that ornato is a peculiar and Sada-esque word, impossible to translate, the whole phrase delicious to pronounce, though all it means, really, is that there were also a lot of trees around, and “a temperate year-round climate.” “The great thing about that place,” Sada goes on to write, “was that it was limited to the efficacy of words, as no photograph existed to give a more precise notion of the supposed marvel.” The description, the reader realizes by the end of the paragraph, is a set-up for a real estate scam. (As it turns out, there is no cascade, and no trees, only that abyss, and the climate.)
Bolaño compared Sada’s baroque writing style to Lezama Lima’s, by way of making the point that because the Cuban Lezama’s baroque reflected the crowded natural effulgence of the tropics, Sada’s baroque is a more impressive verbal invention, a baroque of the desert. It, too, came only from “the efficacy of words.” In Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe (Because it seems like a lie the truth is never known), Sada’s huge, dense masterpiece (a novel routinely referred to as Joycean, with 650 pages and 90 characters, narrated almost entirely in alexandrine, hendecasyllabic, and isosyllabic verse-prose), the desert and its sparsely populated towns teem with all the political turbulence, corruption, and violence of modern Mexico. Sada is to Juan Rulfo—author of only one, hundred-page novel, the Mexican desert ghost-town masterpiece Pedro Páramo, voted by readers of Spain’s most important newspaper, El País, as the greatest Spanish-language novel of the twentieth century—what Beckett was to Joyce, only inverted. Beckett’s minimalism was his response to Joyce unsurpassable maximalism. Sada’s maximalism was his response to Rulfo’s unsurpassable minimalism.
Sada was touring around Mexico with Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe when we met, about twelve years ago. Martin Solares was his editor at Tusquets Mexico and also wore a publicist’s hat. In one of those acts of crazy generosity that typify Martin, but that also seem to occur nowhere else but Mexico, he invited me along on the stretch of tour stopping in Culiacan and Mazatlan. Sada was a monumental storyteller, and I remember many of the tales he told us over those few days. One was about working, when he was younger and new to the city, as a butcher in Mexico City’s labyrinthine old downtown market. Another was about a job he had driving a minivan for a convent of nuns. Sada, unsurprisingly, was a great mimic. He told us that the novelist Salvador Elizondo once made a newspaper photographer who was taking his picture include his pet parakeet in the shot because Elizondo wanted, later, to be able to hold the newspaper up to the bird and say—Sada’s imitation of Elizondo’s nasal drawl is still vivid in my ear—“Look, perico, you’re in the newspaper.” Sada had taken a fiction workshop taught by none other than Juan Rulfo. That led to my favorite story. The agonizingly shy Rulfo had somehow been convinced to accept a great honor in China. He was to change planes in San Francisco. There he sat at the departure gate watching fellow passengers board the flight to China but decided not to join them. He just sat there and didn’t tell anybody. In Peking, the official Chinese and Mexican delegations and the press waited on the airport tarmac.
Sada looked like a stereotypical butcher: a chunky, rugged, prematurely balding man. He grew up in a northern Mexico desert town of a thousand inhabitants. I used to sense in Sada—and identify with, thinking of New York counterparts—an insecurity and discomfort around the urbane, supremely self-confidant Mexico City literary types, all those Letras Libres and “Crack” writers who dressed and comported themselves, as my late wife, Aura, once remarked, “like international bankers.” Sada had a beautiful face, with a proud forehead, a sensuous mouth, and long, narrow eyes that used to make me think of Japanese scroll paintings of samurai.
It was devastating to watch his kidney disease slowly waste him, as if he were imprisoned in fast-forwarding time. Over the past few years, I’d been struggling with my own trauma, the death of my wife, and so I shied away from seeking him out, preferring, whenever I was in Mexico, to wait to run into him at the Pendulo bookstore café or elsewhere in our neighborhood. I always encountered the same incredibly sweet, generous man, quick with a kind word. The last time we spoke he asked me at least twice what I thought of the English title of his novel Casi Nunca, which will soon be published by Graywolf as Almost Never. I told him that I thought it was great. Sada read everything. He was full of praise for a writer from Mexico’s north, the young Yuri Herrera. And he told me that he thought Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, published by Martin Solares at Almadía press, was the best book that the wonderful Oaxaca-based independent press had produced in the past year.
Solares, a close friend of Sada’s, sent me this reminiscence and reflection, which, with apologies, I’ve translated: “He woke every morning well ahead of his occupations. If he was inspired, or finishing a book, he’d jump out of bed at four-thirty in the morning and write until sunrise before starting in on his other work. He wasn’t interested in luxury or power, though his prose is a true luxury. Nobody could write the way he could. In life, he only ever boasted about one thing: his way of writing. To the students who took his writing workshops, he gave one of the simplest but most valuable pieces of advice: in literature there are no excuses. You have to organize your life to be able to write at least a half a page every day. After a week, you’ll have enough words to finish a story, after a month enough for a novella, after a year enough for a novel or a collection of stories … Some of his first novels were written under great economic duress, but they are among his best: Una de dos, Albedrío. It took him six years to write his most ambitious novel, amid personal upheaval and much moving around, but he never lost his energy or concentration … His last two novels were completed despite his illness, in heroic conditions: dictated to his wife, the great Adriana Jiménez, without any sacrifice of style. Do I need to say that El lenguaje del juego, still unpublished, is extraordinary? In barely one hundred pages, just a little more than Pedro Páramo, Sada has bequeathed us his dazzling personal explanation of Mexican violence … Thinking it over, I realize that all his books reinforce this conviction: literature is a voice that emerges out of the dark, and that seeks to relate fascinating acts in a unsurpassable style … [This voice] is obligated to search through the most antiquated Spanish along with the speech of the streets, choose whatever works, and with that create the story, in verses that astonish or make us smile on the darkest of days.” - Francisco Goldman
Sex is the first word and ironic driving force of Daniel Sada’s Almost Never. It is the activity the agronomist Demetrio Sordo decides upon to break up the monotony of nightly strolls, cups of coffee, and games of dominos. The only way this can work, he decides, is if he partakes every 24 hours, and so he goes to the red-light district where he meets Mareya, a prostitute who falls for him. Soon he is in the small town of Sacramento for a wedding, though, where he sees and covets Renata, the last virgin daughter of an upstanding family. The novel can be broken down as a farcical takedown of the macho and the pastoral, as a fun play on the oldest dichotomy—virgins and whores—and it is those things, but Sada’s senses of rhythm and humor elevate it. They dust off these old tropes and present them anew.
Almost Never, originally published as Casi Nunca in 2008, has been translated by Katherine Silver, who’s done exceptional work on Horacio Castellanos Moya and César Aira. Before his death in November of last year, Sada published nine novels, eight short-story collections, and three books of poetry. He was a student of Juan Rulfo’s, and is viewed as the maximalist counter to Rulfo’s extreme minimalism. Though Sada is most lauded in the Spanish-speaking world for his 1999 novel Porque parece mentira, la verdad nunca se sabe, which was written in various meters, this is his first novel to be translated into English. It was not written in meter, but its structurally fascinating rhythm is pushed forward by Sada’s poetic use of colons, em-dashes, and ellipses to stop and propel the action, enacting Demetrio’s back-and-forth.
Daniel Sada
As it
turned out, the half hour passed in a trice. Then the immaculately
platitudinous good-byes we can well surmise: no embrace, no fleeting
kiss (not even) on the sweetheart’s forehead: a most respectful one on
the face (still so far away), nothing! Then, damn, both their hands
moving at chest level (arms bent) while he sketched out his plans to
return soon to Sacramento to see her—see her! see her!! The looks in the
eyes of two saints who, buried deep down in their spirits, longed to be
a bit like dirty devils. That’s another story.
Throughout the
novel, as Demetrio goes between Mireya and Renata, brothels and chaste
courtship, he also jumps from work on farms as an agronomist, to
gambling, to opening up a billiards hall. It is this open foray into
what is perceived in the small-town mind-set as depravity that allows
him to make his final move. Demetrio’s fate is almost incidental,
though, as it’s been the way Sada’s pushed and pulled that’s drawn you
in, into a long-gone world studded with timeless characters and
contemporary humor. If this was not even his best, according to the
Spanish-speaking world, we have much to look forward to. - Alicia Kennedy Almost Never is the late Daniel Sada’s first novel to be translated into English, brought to the Anglophone reading public here through Katherine Silver’s excellent translation. The novel was originally published in 2008 as Casi Nunca, and won Sada the Premio Herralde for that year, an award given out by the well known Editorial Anagrama. Sada was widely recognized as one of the most important and truly creative writers of his generation; just hours before his death in November of last year at age 58, he was awarded his native Mexico’s Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes.
In Almost Never, we follow Demetrio Sordo on a sexual picaresque through the Mexican countryside of the mid-1940s. Demetrio is a youngish agronomist with good prospects — so good that he decides to indulge his lust and personal economic surplus in a little commercial sex at a nice brothel. Demetrio is enchanted and soon enamored of an “exuberant” whore named Mireya. We are treated to vivid and usually repulsive accounts of the “screwing,” for which Demetrio pays increasingly excruciating rates. Not long after, Demetrio travels to the country to accompany his mother to a family wedding — “As you know, because of my age and infirmities, I couldn’t possibly attend such an event alone…” writes the exacting lady — where he meets Renata, refulgent virgin swathed in the moral strictures of rural upper-middle class Catholicism. Demetrio quickly finds himself trying to make sense of his lower and higher urges (mostly lower) in anxious, calculating vacillation between the virgin and the whore, those two irresistible productions of the macho fantasy. The expected difficulties ensue.
Sada has been compared to Joyce and Lezama Lima, among others. There are echoes of Joseph Heller, too, in the deadpan absurdity of the characterizations. Most delightful is Sada’s narrative style: choppy, rhythmic, the voice of the narrator is always amused, always prodding, expanding and retracting its scope. Of note is Sada’s wonderfully unorthodox use of the colon: “And the only thing they, as well as the other passengers, saw at any given moment was a sprinkling of the rails: the one on the left: where: unwanted kisses: liquid moderation, which outside observers might have perceived as flotation.” Punctuation is at its best here, serving the needs of sound, motion, and impression.
The whole novel consists of this kind of unorthodox craftsmanship of language. The narrative is a constant negotiation with the reader. On a funeral: “We won’t talk much about the burial. This synopsis should suffice: there was a chorus of cries, over-the-top good-bye clamors. We’d rather mention certain events that occurred during the short respites from the break.” Describing a meal: “All four got along during the meal, which was delicious. Better not to list each thing they ate so as not to make the narrative too bourgeois, but it was all delicious.” If ever there were good reason to hurl that nauseating workshop dictum Show, don’t tell! out a window, it would be Sada’s playful interpretation of surface description. Sada’s narrator turns description into its own drama, its own comedy — an event worthy of our readerly attention. Here again is a moment to appreciate Katherine Silver’s surpassing translation. The book teems with Sada’s voice and spirit.
Almost Never is like a comedy of manners cut with a pulpy erotic novel, a social satire impelled by a dripping lecherousness. Most of all, it’s a fantastic, exciting book. - Alli Carlisle
During his lifetime, the Mexican novelist Daniel Sada was regarded as the most committed avant-gardist of his generation. A native of Sacramento, in the border state of Coahuila—during his youth a town of a thousand people—he countered the urban fiction of Mexico City’s generación del crack with stories set in the ranches and villages of the northern desert. The austerity of his subjects was matched by the extravagance of his forms. He made his reputation with Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe (1999, “No one ever knows the truth because it looks like a lie”), a 650-page chronicle of electoral fraud written entirely in the meters of the Spanish Golden Age. Some called it the most difficult novel ever to come out of Mexico, and compared it to Joyce and Faulkner in its scope. Closer to home, Sada was said to recall Juan Rulfo (a onetime teacher) in his subject matter, and José Lezama Lima in his baroque technique.
Sada died of kidney disease in November 2011, days after receiving Mexico’s National Prize for Arts and Sciences. The best-regarded book of his later years was Casi nunca (2008), now appearing in English as Almost Never. A far more accessible work than its predecessors, it shows considerable relaxing of ambition. The style is still highly worked, but the plot is broad comedy edging onto farce. The Second World War has just ended, and Demetrio Sordo, a young agronomist of inconsistent ambitions and robust appetites, is visiting brothels for the sheer novelty of sex on demand. He develops a passion for the prostitute Mireya, who believes that Demetrio will rescue her from her situation; but a family obligation takes him north to Sacramento, where he conceives an attraction—described in plain carnal terms—for the virginal, green-eyed Renata Melgarejo. Mireya decides to falsely tell Demetrio she is pregnant. Demetrio decides to abandon Mireya on a train. Renata’s mother decides that Demetrio must be put through circuitous sufferings. And so forth, all in a calculatedly playful telling that is less Lezama Lima than Cabrera Infante. Sex appears for the sake of sex, and style for the sake of style.
The novel begins with a catalog—“Sex, as an apt pretext for breaking the monotony; motor-sex; anxiety-sex; the habit of sex”—which winds around to the protagonist, his erotic resolution and his first brothel visit, all casually introduced in the middle of a paragraph as if they had grown out of the opening abstractions rather than the other way round. This is a poetic more than a fictional logic; though Sada no longer writes paragraphs in meter, he is still drawing his forms from distant sources. Much of his singularity lies in a particular mock-epic narrative voice, sardonic but not malevolent, that peppers the book with exclamations, alliterations and internal rhymes, and sometimes generates plot events on the fly. An awkward conversation between Demetrio and his mother, which, the narrator observes, ought to be set in a precarious rowboat, turns out to summon that rowboat by way of a flood. A group of ranch mechanics is inflated to “peons dextrous in the automotive arts,” or in the even more baroque original, peones . . . muy duchos en lo concerniente a las artes de la mecánica automotriz. Katherine Silver’s translation is deft with faux high style; more treacherous is the opposite register of Mexican slang. Órale, vamos a ensartarnos, with its suggestion of physical skewering, isn’t quite “Hey, you, let’s get it on”; nor is una puta llena de mierda simply “a lowdown whore.” Generally the translation balances such difficulties with a spirit of invention much in keeping with Sada’s own. The ubiquitous !Vaya! is once rendered as “Kerplunk!”
The amorous plot, where it is not purely libidinal, ambles its way through a comedy of provincial manners. Its length derives in part from the slowness with which Demetrio must court Renata under the mores of Sacramento, a town the narrator wryly calls “a world cultural center superior to, let us say, Luxembourg.” The material aspects of the place—the dust, the difficulty of bathing—are memorable, and the scenes of hardship in the more remote desert, where Demetrio’s lack of foresight strands him more than once, are among the best things in the book. The comedy of courtship also has well-drawn touches, as when Renata and her mother repeatedly postpone Demetrio’s visits for days at a time because they are “not presentable” at any given hour. For his part, Demetrio is mostly a passive prop in the marriage negotiations. His name combines one of Shakespeare’s comic lovers with the Spanish word for “deaf,” and his perceptions never extend far past his own lust, except to fasten on the substitute desire for material gain. Alongside the courtship comes his erratic, somewhat surprising transformation into a man of means, first by plying his trade of agronomist on ranches and then, more successfully, by sinking family money into a billiards hall. Mexico is industrializing—from time to time the narrator reminds us how backward are the roads, the plumbing, the communications services, compared to what is coming—and a young man with luck and modest resources may go far indeed.
In a late interview, Sada said that he had once wanted to write an epic poem that was also a nineteenth-century novel, but that he later renounced that ambition as impossible. To read Almost Never as a nineteenth-century novel would be to find it ending after the first act. Its goal is not to show the outcome of Demetrio’s striving, as an older realism would have done, nor to provide, in the manner of the Boom, an exemplary origin story for Mexico. The question, then, is what the book is actually about. Most definitely it is about sex. But for all its verve, sex in Almost Never remains a curiously empty signifier. Sada is not especially interested in opposing hedonic nature to repressive society—a brothel, after all, is a highly social institution—nor does he follow the antic combinatorics of Joyce’s obscenity. Some Latin Americans have written machismo upside down, as when 2666 set its hard-boiled exploits against a background of serial rape and murder, but Almost Never is much cooler in its judgments. Its closing pages reduce sex to pure formalism, and having reached this endpoint, one is inclined to think that form has been the point all along. Like the billiard games that make Demetrio’s money, sex is a mechanical operation shot through with the potential for lyric. Only a true lover of language could take such an approach to writing and still make it read like a seduction.-
He seemed an unremarkable man, poking through Mexico City’s bookstores, his round face notable only for its eternally squinting gaze. He was seen now and then in the literary cafes of La Condesa, where artists hunch over endless rounds of espresso, trading news from imagination’s frontiers.
He was squat, thick, stocky. You might have taken him for a steelworker if not for the ink-stained fingers, the satchel over his shoulder, filled to bursting with musty tomes. Yet, for all the shyness, the unexceptional face, the virtual anonymity, Daniel Sada will be remembered in Mexico as a literary titan of his time, one of the most innovative novelists in contemporary Latin American letters. His books stand in startling contrast to the persona: They are a whirling riot of color, a wild cacophony of voices, an extravagant display of pyrotechnical prose. Before his death in November at the age of 58, Sada seemed poised to win every laurel the Spanish-language literary community had to offer. Roberto Bolano had pronounced him without rival among authors of his generation; Carlos Fuentes had called him a revelation for the world.
Sada was, without a doubt, a writer’s writer. Like Faulkner or Joyce or David Foster Wallace, he produced rich, dense, diabolically difficult novels — some written in octosyllabic and hendecasyllabic meter, all punctuated with a set of bizarre rules. But the rewards, for anyone in love with the Spanish language, were legion. These were gargantuan masterpieces, clear rejoinders to the stark, minimalist work of Juan Rulfo, whose “Pedro Paramo” had dominated the Mexican literary landscape for more than half a century. They stood in clear contrast, too, to thin, bleak novels by young Mexican writers of the Crack Movement, who fought hard to distance themselves from Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Mario Vargas Llosa or Julio Cortazar and then self-destructed in the fray. Just as Sada’s weird, culturally incorrect novels began to be noticed — just as Mexico conferred on him its most coveted national prize — a renal malady took him. And so we are left with the Sada we have.
For Spanish-language readers, it is a splendid accumulation. There are short stories in profusion, enough poems to keep scholars scratching their heads for decades and 10 novels — among them the colossal “Because It Seems So False, the Truth Will Never Be Known,” a fierce, unforgiving portrait of the chaos and corruption of modern Mexico.
For English-language readers, alas, we have but one volume, and it is this translation of “Almost Never,” a valiant effort by Graywolf Press to offer up Sada’s most accessible novel only months after the great man’s death.
I say “valiant” because I admire Graywolf’s resolve to bring a brilliant Mexican writer to the attention of American readers. I say “effort” because the translation fails spectacularly to deliver anything like Sada’s wonderfully wacky prose.
Here, in “Almost Never,” is a bumptious story about sexual obsession that well might appeal to any sentient human being with a few nerve ends and a beating heart. Demetrio, a young agronomist in Oaxaca — it is 1945, in a vibrant metropolis of Mexico — falls in love with a beautiful and inexhaustibly athletic prostitute by the name of Mireya. He is gleefully enjoying her countless charms, visiting her so often that she has no time for other customers, when his mother writes and insists that Demetrio accompany her to a wedding in the desert town of Coahuila. At the wedding, he meets the virginal Renata, whose beauty is so arresting that he cannot help but propose marriage. Although Renata accepts, she is not so easily won. There is to be no touching, she tells him, and certainly no conjugating. Not even a whisper of love, for at least a year. But Demetrio is full of vim and vigor — this is post-World War Mexico, after all, and the country is bursting with possibility. So it’s back to Mireya. And then forth to Renata. And then back, forth, back. You get the picture.
So far: the man-woman thing? It’s a well-worn tale. Hapless hedonist is made to choose between chaste and carnal. All the same, in its Spanish iteration, the story is funny, impish, bawdy, headily reminiscent of Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones” — and it’s written with a prose that never falters. Demetrio tries mightily, if not heroically, to rid himself of Mireya, even as he labors to meet the imperatives of a harsh fiancee. As we shuttle across the Mexican desert with him, a whole country and people come to life.
In “Almost Never,” in other words, we see a writer in full maturity, a master in control of his craft. No need for polysyllabic meter. No need to gild the goose. -
In a society that represses sex, the people are ruled by a desire for it to an absurd degree. That is the primary lesson of Almost Never, author Daniel Sada’s comic novel about the quest of Demetrio to wed, so he can bed, Renata, a beauty from a dusty Mexican town in the last ‘40s. “Sex” is the first word in the book; “sheer relief” are its last.
Demetrio begins his journey in Oaxaca where he holds a steady, promising job as a agronomist. His income is regular, as his sex life. (He is a consistent customer of a prostitute named Mireya.) During a visit to the town of Sacramento with his mother, he spies Renata, whom he immediately desires and decides to marry. This necessitates a lengthy courtship process, during which he briefly runs away with and then abandons Mireya in a fit of frustration and then moves to his aunt’s house in Sacramento in order to be closer to Renata.
Traveling in Mexico, in this time before widespread paved roads, is described as an “exhausting trek”, but everything in this society is an exhausting trek. Renata’s mother controls the courtship process in the most painstakingly slow method possible dictated by a series of arcane and absurd rules. When Demetrio impulsively licks Renata’s hand while kissing it, this serious affront sets him back for months. (The second of the “allocutions” that Renata must follow “concerns the filthy nature of all things carnal, meaning that the beau should never dare kiss any part of the beloved’s body, for kisses in general led to the worst of perversities.”)
Demetrio funnels his thwarted energy towards making money. In these endeavors this society dictates that what is normally considered “sinful” can be glossed over in the interest of material success and he eventually makes his fortune in pool halls. Starting with Mireya, sex and money become increasingly intertwined and Demetrio.
Sada’s satiric aims are directed both at Demetrio’s character and the Mexican society that shapes it, both of which are responsible for his boyishness. Almost Never is often about horniness, the pubescent desire to have an urge satisfied immediately and being stifled at every step. Demetrio appears to be calmest and happiest at the beginning, with a regular income and regular sex. But even then there is always desire for the release that something else—more money, more sex—might be able to provide.
The most clearly defined sexual roles in this world are that of an immature macho man and his preening, protective mother. Both are equally maudlin in their conceptions and both support each other in their neediness. Sada has a lot of fun with the depiction of Demetrio’s Aunt Zulema, another sexually stymied soul who lost a chance with her childhood beau years ago. She attempts to compensate by taking on a warped role for Demetrio and in one of the funniest scenes, she convinces him to let him adopt her as a second mother:
“Okay, I understand what you are proposing… It’s just that for me it’s important to know what being my second mother means to you.”
“Only that you may live in this house whenever you want; only that when I die you will own it.”
A barely concealed sexual tension exists between them; they frequently linger over affectionate kisses for too long.
The mothers help Demetrio decode the arcane traditions governing Renata and her mother and the courtship process. They in turn seem to derive some sort of energy from assisting him in reaching his goal, confirming that he is “good” and that life continues in its proper place.
Sada’s greatest innovation is in his unique stream of conscious style by a third person narrator, who is removed and wry, sometimes trying to capture the interior thoughts in a comical manner. Sada employs heavy use of punctuation to create a rhythmic effects that mirror the stuttering starts and stops of a rambling mind: “In this sense it’s worth emphasizing the vague indifference of he who stared resolutely out the bus window (what might the scatterings in the fields evoke), then turned, like a ghoulish cat, to look at the belly of the pregnant woman… And after that—alas! where precisely should he turn: to the north, the east, the west, straight down the middle, or where…The border, the state of Tamaulipas—yes?”
Sada died in 2011 and his works are now finally being translated into English. His experiments in style and the unique combination of effects in language and punctuation, most likely explain how long it has taken for his works to be translated. Almost Never, which received the Herralde Prize for Spanish literature in 2008, would seem like the ideal place to start. (Graywolf Press is also smartly trumpeting an endorsement from Roberto Bolaño with its release.)
The experimentation in language is largely successful in creating a disjointed, satiric view of a shallow immature man, yet the mocking of a distinctly Mexican and dated style of maudlin masculinity left me a bit cold. Still this is an extraordinary, wittily crass book. - Michael Buening
Almost Never begins and ends immersed in sex. Its protagonist, Demetrio Sordo, is torn by sex: on the one hand there is Mireya, a whore at the local brothel that he is swept away by and whom he is soon visiting six days a week; on the other hand there is the ultra-prim and proper Renata, whom he begins to woo and who snares him in an extremely drawn-out -- and hands-off -- courtship.
The novel is set in Mexico, and begins in 1945. Demetrio, not yet thirty, is an agronomist -- the "administrator and principal agricultural expert" at a huge orchard. It is on a trip to his mother's distant hometown that he meets Renata. He is drawn to her, even though she demands a certain distance and formality be kept -- but then Demetrio lives so far away that it would be difficult to rush things anyway.
Renata, the youngest in a group of daughters, and the only one not yet married, wants to follow in her sisters' footsteps and escape from her mother, but she also takes her mother's lessons about men to heart. It's been drilled into her that they have to be teased along, made to suffer before any of their base desires are fulfilled. Indeed, even when Demetrio and Renata are already engaged she maintains a reserve:
"I love you, Renata. Let me at least hug you."
"No, not even that. Things have to be done properly."
"But no one is watching us. Come on !"
"Remember, I was well brought up, and it makes no difference whether anybody is watching us ... God is."
For a while things go well enough in Demetrio double-life, between his constantly available whore and the woman he is wooing but only sees very rarely. But Mireya has her own plans for the future, too, and wants to escape the brothel, and when she sets her little plan in action it upsets Demetrio's world, too.
Demetrio moves on -- to new jobs and opportunities -- but has some difficulty settling down, in no small part because Renata, that "obedient automaton", still insists on proceeding ever so slowly. So it continues:
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Penitence.
Repressive feints.
Desire on the verge.
Insidious respect, still.
How much longer till ...?
Pain below.
Pain above.
Pain -- where ?
Yes, Almost Never is basically a long and somewhat
circuitous courtship-novel -- lightened up by Sada's appealing tone, and
by impulsive Demetrio's misadventures along the way.
Typically:
To avoid such a fix he found a different fix and injected it with a dose of mischief
He makes money, he loses money, he tries to juggle his women --
and is juggled by them, too.
Each of the characters -- including the various old ladies -- tries to
get things their way and they all do their best in trying to manipulate
others, but they pretty much all discover -- especially Mireya -- that
even the best laid plans can't be counted on working out.
Almost Never is a drawn-out tale in which not all that much happens, but Sada has an off-beat style that livens up the pace and helps hold the reader's interest. The backdrop of a changing society and nation in the post-war years also bolsters the narrative.
Good if slightly limited fun, Almost Never is an inventive variation on tales of sex and desire and mores. - M.A.Orthofer
Daniel Sada by Jose Manuel Prieto
Daniel Sada and I have spent many afternoons together in cafés in La Condesa, Mexico City’s bohemian neighborhood. Of all the Mexican writers of my generation, Sada is the one I most admire, for his highly rigorous technique, the unequaled density of his prose, his steel-solid aesthetic sensibility. We always talk about literature, sharing ideas about our own projects and discussing what’s happening in Mexican writing, with numerous tangents into world literature. As can be seen from this, our most recent conversation, Sada has a clear pedagogical mission. He is able to hold in his mind radically different models, alongside the most refined metric forms in the Spanish language, which he utilizes with the familiarity of a daily visitor. Everything that blossoms most wildly in his work entails a level of difficulty that seems at times insurmountable for the common reader—but that reader, in any case, is not the one he has in mind. Many critics note his kinship with Juan Rulfo: the world he sketches, the violence running through it, the irascibility of his characters, but even that does not adequately explain the weight and cardinal importance of his work in contemporary Mexican letters. His principal text, Porque parece mentira, la verdad nunca se sabe (Because it seems to be a lie, the truth is never known), from 1999, invariably arouses a certain distress in his readers’ hearts: its 700-page length, its unique stylistic mixture of colloquialism and elegant language, its internal rhythm (about which I’ve asked him and on which he expands here); and a healthy distress, that of greatness, which I hope readers of BOMB will experience, and about which I’ve attempted to spark him to talk.
Much admired by both Roberto Bolano, who said, “Of my generation I most admire Daniel Sada,” and by Carlos Fuentes, who said that Daniel Sada “will be a revelation for world literature,” Mexican author Daniel Sada has now been published in English for the first time by Graywolf Press. Almost Never, “a Rabelaisian tale of lust and longing,” provides a bawdy and mildly satiric look at the whole concept of machismo as it exists in the mid-1940s in Mexico. Sada’s main character, Demetrio Sordo, almost thirty when the novel opens in 1945, grew up in rural Parras in northern Mexico, but he has recently been living near Oaxaca in southern Mexico, working six or seven days a week as an agronomist in charge of a large ranch. Bored by the usual nightly “entertainments” of “dominoes in seedy dives,” dull strolls for a mile or two followed by a cup of coffee, he finally concludes that “sex was the most obvious option.” Taking a taxi to a local brothel, he meets the beautiful brunette Mireya, revealing his personal charm by introducing himself with “Hey, you, come on already, let’s go to bed.”
Demetrio’s increasingly adventuresome relationship with Mireya, explicitly described, becomes more and more obsessive as he hastens to visit her as often as possible over the next few weeks. The visits come to a temporary stop, however, when he receives a letter from his mother in Parras, asking him to come home at Christmas to accompany her to a wedding in Sacramento, even farther away to the north. As Demetrio’s trip will be over eight hundred miles through rural countryside, he will need to spend three
days traveling there and three days back, with only one day at the
wedding itself. Demetrio has no car or truck, and there are few paved
roads. At the wedding in Sacramento, however, he meets and falls
instantly in love with the beautiful, virginal Renata Malgarejo, so
closely tied to the local culture of virginity that when he uses the
pronoun “tu,” in telling her he will write to her from Oaxaca, she is
shocked by his “familiarity.” She may allow the use of “tu” next time
he visits, she says—on his vacation in August, nine months from then.
He may even be allowed to hold her hand.
Upon his return to the Oaxaca area, Demetrio and Mireya resume their relationship, but eventually she demands, “Get me out of this hellhole. I’m sick of being a slave to pleasure. I want to give myself to you, be faithful to you, have a family…I love you.” Demetrio, however, temporizes, saying that he is saving his money for a down payment on a house, that “I’m thinking about buying a palace. You deserve nothing
less….” Faced with one woman who will do literally anything for him
and who wants to get married right away, and another woman whom he has
never even kissed and who plays the ultimate “hard-to-get” role,
Demetrio faces a rare set of challenges, determined to get what he wants
from both.
In a slangy and breezy tone, the author develops his plot with more and more complications, clearly having fun with his audience at Demetrio’s expense and showing him to be both boorish and selfish, manipulating everyone around him—all of his victims women. At the same time, the author clearly understands Demetrio and is never harsh in his judgment of him. Demetrio is as much a product of his time as Renata and Mireya are, and as the novel’s chronology progresses from 1945 through 1947, with the country’s increasing industrialization, the migration of the rural population to the cities, new opportunities for young men to make money in new kinds of jobs, and improvements in transportation, Demetrio becomes emblematic o
f
a whole generation of young men for whom the sky seems to be the limit.
The biggest danger, of course, is that these young men, including
Demetrio, are actually inexperienced and naïve to the ways of the
outside world, potential victims of other men who are more clever, more
powerful, or more worldly, just as the women are victims of the men who
have been dominating them socially and sexually for generations.
Sada is a master of language, and though his characters are, of necessity, somewhat caricatured as he pokes fun at them, they are lively and full of personal quirks. Peripheral characters, like Dona Telma, Demetrio’s mother, and Dona Zulema, his aunt (“the treacle tornado”), have stories which give depth to the author’s revelations about life and love, and Renata’s relationship with her domineering mother is an absolute classic. Demetrio’s dreams reveal that he does have a conscience, even when he commits boorish acts to extricate himself from complications he has never expected. His courtship of Renata, an exercise in frustration, has moments of high humor, and his agony at the slow pace of the relationship is matched, at times, by the reader’s own impatience. When Demetrio finally, in rebellion, begins to think of the whore Mireya as an “awesome saint…sexual saint, embossed upon the always-changing great beyond” and refers to her as “most holy Mireya,” the reader understands his state of mind.
The
story with all its complications and bawdy language mocks the
pretensions of its characters at the same time that it explains and
even, in some cases, tries to justify them in terms of the social
context of the period. The action is often absurd and the characters’
behavior outrageous. The language and sexual imagery are crude, and
some readers will find them at least as vulgar as Demetrio is, something
the author, no doubt, intended. Translator Katherine Silver deserves
much credit for translating this novel and maintaining its tone, with a
only few minor missteps (a character told to “suck it up,” someone
referred to as “screwed up”), which seemed jarring for a novel set in
the mid-1940s. Daniel Sada, whose novels have been, until now, unknown
to the English-speaking world, should become a major “new” Mexican
author, receiving the praise he deserves here for works of which we have
been ignorant until now.
*Author Daniel Sada died on Nov. 18, 2011, at age 58 after a long illness, just hours after the Government of Mexico granted him the National Prize of Sciences and Arts 2011 (for Literature). - - marywhipplereviews.com/daniel-sada-almost-never-mexico/
Almost Never is a drawn-out tale in which not all that much happens, but Sada has an off-beat style that livens up the pace and helps hold the reader's interest. The backdrop of a changing society and nation in the post-war years also bolsters the narrative.
Good if slightly limited fun, Almost Never is an inventive variation on tales of sex and desire and mores. - M.A.Orthofer
Daniel Sada by Jose Manuel Prieto
Daniel Sada and I have spent many afternoons together in cafés in La Condesa, Mexico City’s bohemian neighborhood. Of all the Mexican writers of my generation, Sada is the one I most admire, for his highly rigorous technique, the unequaled density of his prose, his steel-solid aesthetic sensibility. We always talk about literature, sharing ideas about our own projects and discussing what’s happening in Mexican writing, with numerous tangents into world literature. As can be seen from this, our most recent conversation, Sada has a clear pedagogical mission. He is able to hold in his mind radically different models, alongside the most refined metric forms in the Spanish language, which he utilizes with the familiarity of a daily visitor. Everything that blossoms most wildly in his work entails a level of difficulty that seems at times insurmountable for the common reader—but that reader, in any case, is not the one he has in mind. Many critics note his kinship with Juan Rulfo: the world he sketches, the violence running through it, the irascibility of his characters, but even that does not adequately explain the weight and cardinal importance of his work in contemporary Mexican letters. His principal text, Porque parece mentira, la verdad nunca se sabe (Because it seems to be a lie, the truth is never known), from 1999, invariably arouses a certain distress in his readers’ hearts: its 700-page length, its unique stylistic mixture of colloquialism and elegant language, its internal rhythm (about which I’ve asked him and on which he expands here); and a healthy distress, that of greatness, which I hope readers of BOMB will experience, and about which I’ve attempted to spark him to talk.
José Manuel Prieto The first time I heard about Porque parece mentira, la verdad nunca se sabe
(Because it seems to be a lie, the truth is never known), I learned
about its internal rhythm, its infamous octosyllabic meter. Can you
explain that a bit for readers? What effect are you seeking there?
Daniel Sada It is
in no way a desire to be flashy or overly elaborate that leads me to use
octosyllables, hendecasyllables, alexandrines, decasyllables or
heptasyllables. I have a deep knowledge, from childhood, of the most
elemental constructions of these metric forms, so characteristic of
Spanish. In my primary school in Sacramento, Coahuila, Panchita Cabrera,
a rural schoolteacher who was an ardent fan of the Spanish Golden Age
(a type that no longer exists) taught us these phonetic techniques with
one goal in mind: that we might fine-tune our ears in order to
appreciate the expressive delicacy and virulence of our language. In
fact, to be honest, it’s more difficult for me to write free prose,
because I don’t have any technical (phonetic) resources on hand that
might provide some support. Now, in the most recent novels I’ve written,
Luces artificiales (Artificial lights) and Ritmo delta (Delta rhythm), and in an as-yet-unpublished novella titled La duración de los empeños simples
(The Duration of simple endeavors), I’ve let go of meter, and for that
very reason I’ve had to work much harder to write them. I should also
say that for many years I buried myself in the study of Spanish
rhetoric, partly in order to destroy and then rebuild, in a different
way, the internal logic of the Spanish language (to rid it of aridity
and give it more expressive color). The result, over the years, is not
definitive. The process of transfiguration continues to expand, and
that’s one of the reasons I keep on writing. I have plans for literary
projects that, according to my calculations, will take up the next 20
years of my life. This whole agenda depends more on my health than on
the health of my ideas.
JMP But doesn’t it seem a bit
unusual to you that a prose writer would rely on meter? Do you know of
any similar instances in Spanish or in any other language? How do your
readers react? Do they even perceive it? How does it aid in the reading
of these books?
DS Of course the use of meter
by a prose writer is unusual, especially in the literature of our time.
With regard to that, I must emphasize my classical education. I read
Dante’s Divine Comedy, in hendecasyllabic lines, in the
Argentinean writer Bartolomé Mitre’s translation, direct from the Tuscan
to the Spanish, and also the Poema de mío cid (Poem of my cid) and La Araucana. These three works, in addition to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Aeneid,
have all the characteristics of novelized histories, with characters,
plots and subplots branching out in a form that moves beyond the most
simple and unequivocal aspects of a linear projection with a
chronological movement. To all this I should add that the works are
written in verse, and I wanted to attempt something similar. My novel Albedrio
(Free will) is written in octosyllables, and some of my short stories
are written in decasyllables, hendecasyllables and alexandrines. In my
novel Because It Seems To Be a Lie the Truth Is Never Known,
I utilized all the meters I know of in Spanish. However, the problem
that presented itself in the context of this whole range of constraints
is that the reader might never develop empathy, might become confused if
she or he does not have a basic knowledge of the rhythms of our tongue.
In some fundamental way, anyone might conceive of all of this as just
so much pedantry, but I begin from the idea that my work will be read by
ideal readers, who are connoisseurs and lovers of meter rather than
simply arrogant exegetes. The end point of this audacity can only be
reached via our own passions: you either take it or leave it, and that’s
that. Readers love me or hate me; there is no gray area. Now, in Artificial Lights and Delta Rhythm,
I have abandoned meter, not because these are urban novels, but because
I want to discover how I might function without so many restrictions.
Some readers thank me for it, while others reprimand me for having
abandoned my perhaps unmistakable literary stamp. And as for me, I can
only say that I will write exactly what I want to write.
JMP Can you talk a bit about the genesis and history of Because It Seems To Be A Lie?
DS When I wrote that book I
was immersed in nineteenth-century novels, and I realized that most of
them incorporated an entire gallery of characters: Dickens’s Oliver Twist has 67 characters; Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
has 27 female characters, including the protagonist—a marvelous diorama
of temperaments that perhaps comprise all that women have been and will
be; in War and Peace there are 109 characters, and none of
them is incidental, but rather each has a direct effect on the plot. In
terms of what we might call the marrow of Balzac’s A Human Comedy, with the trilogy formed of the novels Lost Illusions, The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans and Old Goriot,
it’s possible to enumerate 234 characters. Novelistic ventures of this
caliber impressed and informed me: in them it was necessary to touch on
every social stratus, and in turn I required myself to conceive of a
story with 90 characters, with bifurcations and reflections that might
extrapolate narrative time and overflow my imagination, which is
always—and this is for certain—circumscribed by the most evident
parameters of reality. I wanted to see the novel as a totalizing
venture.
JMP What is your relationship
with so-called border literature? Do you believe that such a literature
exists, and if so, do you see yourself within that framework? An
offshoot of this question, seen from a U.S. perspective, is to imagine
the relationship with literature that is constructed in the south of the
United States. I’m thinking, for example, of Cormac McCarthy.
DS I am exceedingly irritated
by the fragmentation of literature: that a writer might self-identify
as “detective,” “fantasy,” “romantic” or “minimalist” is reason enough
for me to stop reading her or him. I like it when literature surprises
me as I move farther into a story’s dramatic density. If know in advance
that the book in question is a “thriller” or a work of “science
fiction” or whatever naming device might help me to sight the path I
will traverse, then I’d prefer not to traverse anything, not to read
anything. Likewise with so-called border literature. I believe that a
reader who is truly passionate about literature is not interested in any
kind of classification. It may be that this whole mess of adjectives
thrown together any which way only works for didactic ends; perhaps in
that context the infinite number of conceptual demarcations might be
justified, but for me as a reader or as a writer, they don’t work at
all. I could give a fig about the future of border literature.
JMP I understand perfectly
what you’re saying, and the irritations of such narrow demarcations. But
it’s a question, in some of your stories, in some of your books, of
narratives that take place in rural settings, with a certain very
palpable and quotidian presence of violence. Perhaps you might add
something more. Artificial Lights is a very urban story.
Has making this change signified a certain challenge for you? Does your
abandonment of meter have something to do with the abandonment of that
particular landscape?
DS My abandonment of meter is
partial. I now put my faith in cadences, rather than withdrawing from
any type of rhythmic emphasis. I confess, a propos of that, that I could
never write outside what my ear can’t even conceive as a modulation.
JMP Talk to me a bit about
your relationship with film. How many of your books have been made into
movies? How do your books, your baroque writing style (I don’t know if
that’s an adjective you use for your own books, and incidentally I’d
like to know if you consider yourself a baroque writer), adapt to the
more linear texture of film?
DS None of the stories I’ve
written has been conceived for film. Suddenly, over time, many readers
have commented that they see cinematic scenarios in my work, and in
addition, that my dramatic texture seems to them to function excellently
on-screen. I don’t know why such a large number of filmmakers and
passionate fans of film have appeared in my life. I had to get used to
hearing overly elaborate justifications for dramatic compositional
methods that I found extremely strange and inapplicable to my work, and
despite that hodge-podge of excesses I simply couldn’t assimilate the
idea that one of my stories might work on the big screen, until 1996,
when Marcel Sisniega, who at that time was a young film director,
proposed to me that we shoot my novel Una de dos (One of
two). I accepted, with some skepticism. Marcel had the good judgment to
invite me to write the screenplay together with him, and after I
accepted, I set two conditions: that despite being an adaptation, the
film would preserve the spirit of the book; and that it would maintain a
consistent rhythm in which the level of intrigue would never falter. We
worked on the screenplay for over a year. There were struggles, and in
our excessive desire to achieve perfection, we wrote a number of
different treatments. We agreed on one thing: that we were not going to
make a bad movie simply to remain faithful to the book. To our surprise,
the film won a number of prizes, but it had no success at the box
office. In the years following 2002, One of Two has been
shown in art houses and on TV. It’s become a symbolic reference point
for recent Mexican filmmaking. And on the other hand, to answer another
part of your question: it’s true that I’m considered a baroque writer,
and what can I do? In the oldest meaning of the term, the baroque is the
“poorly made,” the “excessive,” the “overdecorated.” I tend toward
explorations into language, and I attempt to achieve clarity and
eloquence in the anecdotal movement of my stories. The rest is a system
of aesthetic inquiry that, in essence, should not alter the development
of characters or stories.
JMP To go a little deeper
into the baroque: what would differentiate a writer who is baroque from
one who isn’t? Within the boundaries of work in Spanish, we always talk
about writers like Alejo Carpentier or José Lezama Lima. In your last
response, you basically characterized yourself as a baroque writer. What
are the characteristics of baroque writing—a baroque approach to
reality that attracts you, or that you consider useful in order to delve
more deeply into reality and locate truths that might otherwise escape
you?
DS It’s difficult for me to
call myself a baroque writer. I would like to be a writer without
adjectives, because I know that grants me all the liberty in the world,
including my tendency to measure my prose. If Carpentier and Lezama Lima
are known as baroque writers, I don’t think that such a denomination
adds to or detracts from their literary merit. All you can say about
them is that they do not write in meter.
JMP Talk to me about your relationship with Juan Rulfo. Did you know him personally?
DS Throughout my life I’ve
known many intellectuals and very few artists. In my thinking, I place
artists at a much a higher level than intellectuals. It goes without
saying that thoughtful people interest me, but when I discover that a
person is also creative, I can say that I’m almost touching heaven. For
me, knowing Juan Rulfo has been one of the best gifts life has given me.
Rulfo was familiar with an amazing amount of literature, but he never
went around boasting about everything he had read, and therefore he was
not an intellectual. He once recommended that I shouldn’t persist in
intellectualizing everything I was experiencing, because that would end
up getting in the way of my perception. Reading is perpetual
nourishment, never a vehicle for vanity. Intellectuals, in general, are
braggarts, perhaps because they do not possess a true interior
landscape. Artists are more silent; they are observers and have,
naturally, a great capacity for astonishment. Artists are continual
absorbers, and it is perhaps only much later that they pick and choose.
These are all Rulfian concepts, and were spoken, I will confess, very
close to my ear, as if they were secrets that can only be told in low
tones.
JMP Tell me something about your latest novel, Delta Rhythm, and in what way it is or isn’t a continuation of what you’ve been doing up to this point. And what are you working on now?
DS Delta Rhythm
is a novel about dreams, and that particular rhythm consists of a
duration of approximately one hour, which is quite exceptional, since
it’s only possible to have a dream of that temporal dimension once or
perhaps twice a year. There are four dream rhythms (and here I’m
applying solely the physiological mechanics of oneirism), which are
alpha, beta, gamma and delta, with this last being the most prolonged
and the most saturated with different states of mind. Delta rhythm is
sometimes hurried and sometimes slow. It’s also digressive, symbolic,
ambiguous and derivative. I attempt to engage all these modes in the
style and form of my novel. I like it when the plot speeds up and then
immediately slows down; I like it to be symbolic and all the rest. It’s
an attempt to align myself with dream logic.
I’d prefer not to talk about my next novel, because I’m very
superstitious. All I’ll tell you now is that it’s a plot based in
obsessions. The novel is short and will be out in March 2006.
JMP What kind of writer do you think you are? Could you answer this by thinking through one of your books?
DS I still don’t know what
kind of writer I am. I know that I’m not famous, which allows me to
continue to explore my perception and my psyche with absolute freedom.
Translated from the Spanish by Jen Hofer. http://bombmagazine.org/article/2793/daniel-sadaMuch admired by both Roberto Bolano, who said, “Of my generation I most admire Daniel Sada,” and by Carlos Fuentes, who said that Daniel Sada “will be a revelation for world literature,” Mexican author Daniel Sada has now been published in English for the first time by Graywolf Press. Almost Never, “a Rabelaisian tale of lust and longing,” provides a bawdy and mildly satiric look at the whole concept of machismo as it exists in the mid-1940s in Mexico. Sada’s main character, Demetrio Sordo, almost thirty when the novel opens in 1945, grew up in rural Parras in northern Mexico, but he has recently been living near Oaxaca in southern Mexico, working six or seven days a week as an agronomist in charge of a large ranch. Bored by the usual nightly “entertainments” of “dominoes in seedy dives,” dull strolls for a mile or two followed by a cup of coffee, he finally concludes that “sex was the most obvious option.” Taking a taxi to a local brothel, he meets the beautiful brunette Mireya, revealing his personal charm by introducing himself with “Hey, you, come on already, let’s go to bed.”
Demetrio’s increasingly adventuresome relationship with Mireya, explicitly described, becomes more and more obsessive as he hastens to visit her as often as possible over the next few weeks. The visits come to a temporary stop, however, when he receives a letter from his mother in Parras, asking him to come home at Christmas to accompany her to a wedding in Sacramento, even farther away to the north. As Demetrio’s trip will be over eight hundred miles through rural countryside, he will need to spend three
days traveling there and three days back, with only one day at the
wedding itself. Demetrio has no car or truck, and there are few paved
roads. At the wedding in Sacramento, however, he meets and falls
instantly in love with the beautiful, virginal Renata Malgarejo, so
closely tied to the local culture of virginity that when he uses the
pronoun “tu,” in telling her he will write to her from Oaxaca, she is
shocked by his “familiarity.” She may allow the use of “tu” next time
he visits, she says—on his vacation in August, nine months from then.
He may even be allowed to hold her hand.Upon his return to the Oaxaca area, Demetrio and Mireya resume their relationship, but eventually she demands, “Get me out of this hellhole. I’m sick of being a slave to pleasure. I want to give myself to you, be faithful to you, have a family…I love you.” Demetrio, however, temporizes, saying that he is saving his money for a down payment on a house, that “I’m thinking about buying a palace. You deserve nothing
less….” Faced with one woman who will do literally anything for him
and who wants to get married right away, and another woman whom he has
never even kissed and who plays the ultimate “hard-to-get” role,
Demetrio faces a rare set of challenges, determined to get what he wants
from both.In a slangy and breezy tone, the author develops his plot with more and more complications, clearly having fun with his audience at Demetrio’s expense and showing him to be both boorish and selfish, manipulating everyone around him—all of his victims women. At the same time, the author clearly understands Demetrio and is never harsh in his judgment of him. Demetrio is as much a product of his time as Renata and Mireya are, and as the novel’s chronology progresses from 1945 through 1947, with the country’s increasing industrialization, the migration of the rural population to the cities, new opportunities for young men to make money in new kinds of jobs, and improvements in transportation, Demetrio becomes emblematic o
f
a whole generation of young men for whom the sky seems to be the limit.
The biggest danger, of course, is that these young men, including
Demetrio, are actually inexperienced and naïve to the ways of the
outside world, potential victims of other men who are more clever, more
powerful, or more worldly, just as the women are victims of the men who
have been dominating them socially and sexually for generations.Sada is a master of language, and though his characters are, of necessity, somewhat caricatured as he pokes fun at them, they are lively and full of personal quirks. Peripheral characters, like Dona Telma, Demetrio’s mother, and Dona Zulema, his aunt (“the treacle tornado”), have stories which give depth to the author’s revelations about life and love, and Renata’s relationship with her domineering mother is an absolute classic. Demetrio’s dreams reveal that he does have a conscience, even when he commits boorish acts to extricate himself from complications he has never expected. His courtship of Renata, an exercise in frustration, has moments of high humor, and his agony at the slow pace of the relationship is matched, at times, by the reader’s own impatience. When Demetrio finally, in rebellion, begins to think of the whore Mireya as an “awesome saint…sexual saint, embossed upon the always-changing great beyond” and refers to her as “most holy Mireya,” the reader understands his state of mind.
The
story with all its complications and bawdy language mocks the
pretensions of its characters at the same time that it explains and
even, in some cases, tries to justify them in terms of the social
context of the period. The action is often absurd and the characters’
behavior outrageous. The language and sexual imagery are crude, and
some readers will find them at least as vulgar as Demetrio is, something
the author, no doubt, intended. Translator Katherine Silver deserves
much credit for translating this novel and maintaining its tone, with a
only few minor missteps (a character told to “suck it up,” someone
referred to as “screwed up”), which seemed jarring for a novel set in
the mid-1940s. Daniel Sada, whose novels have been, until now, unknown
to the English-speaking world, should become a major “new” Mexican
author, receiving the praise he deserves here for works of which we have
been ignorant until now.*Author Daniel Sada died on Nov. 18, 2011, at age 58 after a long illness, just hours after the Government of Mexico granted him the National Prize of Sciences and Arts 2011 (for Literature). - - marywhipplereviews.com/daniel-sada-almost-never-mexico/
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