Mariana Dimópulos, All My Goodbyes, Trans. by Alice Whitmore, Giramondo, 2017.
“All My Goodbyes is a virtuoso performance. A love story told in razor sharp fragments, the novel lies at the intersection of memory, violence and trauma.”—Katie Kitamura
A young Argentinian woman feels her identity is in pieces. Diffident, self-critical, wary of commitment, she is condemned, or condemns herself, to repeated acts of departure, from places, parents, and lovers. Then, arriving in the southernmost region of Patagonia, she convinces herself she has found happiness, until she’s caught up in the horrific murders that haunt her story.
"Remarkable . . . The destabilizing sequence of events illuminates Dimópulos’s commitment to portraying a new global citizenship characterized by interruption, dispersal, and disruption.”—BOMB
"[A] splintered novella about murders that haunt a girl in Patagonia. Dimópulos constructs time as fluid, making the narrative structure of the book fragmented."—World Literature Today
"Mariana Dimópulos's wonderfully strange and addictive All My Goodbyes is narrated by a woman driven to abandon everything the moment it becomes familiar. The scattered pieces of her story—each of them wonderfully distinct, laced with insight, violence, and sensuality—cohere into a profound evocation of restlessness, of the sublime and imprisoning act of letting go."—Julie Buntin
"How to describe the clear and mysterious force of Mariana Dimópulos’s writing: the brief intensity; the compassionate irony; the grand themes viewed through the lens of a microscope; the recognition and exceeding of past traditions. Above all, it is a writing gestated in unknown lands."—Esther Cross
A young Argentinian woman leads a peripatetic existence—circling the globe in search of a way to stop moving. When she finally returns to the Southern Hemisphere, she stumbles upon a kind of belonging only to have it stripped away by two gruesome murders.
In Málaga she is called Luisa; in Barcelona, Lola; but regardless of the narrator's uncertain name and changing life story, the reader knows her intimately through the disarming simplicity of her voice. Dimópulos’ main character is the daughter of a methodically nihilist physicist and has been raised to view every part of her world as wholly conditional. She leaves Buenos Aries for Madrid when she is 23, in part as a form of escape from her father’s expectations. At first, the narrator is content to “play…at the artist’s life,” rooming with a Uruguayan guitar player, smoking hashish, and “[worrying], ostensibly, about the grim fate of the world.” Soon enough, however, she begins to feel her prototypical brand of restless alienation and launches herself into hapless continental wandering. From Madrid to Almagro, from Málaga to Heidelberg to Berlin, from Greece to Tunisia, back to Buenos Aires and down to the tip of Patagonia, the narrator creates lives marked by repetition, simplicity, entangled passions, and, ultimately, the freedom to disassemble her identity and start again. Along the way, she intersects with a cast of characters—acerbic doña Carmen, uber-capitalist Stefan, earnest Alexander, and the forlorn Julia and her young son, Kolya—all of whom try to make a space which will entice her to stay. It is not until she signs on as a seasonal laborer at the Patagonian mountain farm of Marco Cupin and his mother that she discovers a place where she can finally “recline without a shred of skepticism, trusting completely in the resilience of chairs and beds,” a place where she can become “a magnificent animal: soft, compact, whole.” When that illusory wholeness is stripped away by the murders of Marco and his mother, the narrator begins to weave together the disparate threads of her many identities into a slim, contradictory, thorny assemblage of memories, impressions, and thoughts that do not define her life so much as observe it, scientifically, as if from a great distance.
A marvelously interior novel, unique in its perceptions, that traffics both in the joy of invention and the sorrow of memory. - Kirkus Reviews
Mariana Dimópulos’s remarkable All My Goodbyes (Transit Books), the latest novel in Giramondo’s Southern Latitudes series, follows a young Argentinian woman during a decade of departures: from her hometown of Buenos Aires, through Madrid, Almagro, Malaga, Heilbrunn, Heidelberg, Berlin, Patagonia, and finally back to Argentina, where she beholds a murder. Susan Sontag—whose biography Dimópulos translated into Spanish—writes in Styles of Radical Will, “The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.” One has a sense that Dimópulos’s character, too, is trying to exhaust her possibilities.
Even as the narrator stakes claim to a fragile identity—“the raw stock of my being never seemed to cook”—in fact her character comes through fully conceived. She is ambulatory, transient, and receptive. She works as a glass stacker at IKEA and sorts auto-parts at a factory. She is so autonomous that she is impossible to exploit. Working as a baker’s assistant, she is only at ease when customers leave, “which was almost never, for it seemed they only entered.” She doesn’t “understand what the word for is for. Being useful is of no use to me.” She is terrifically funny, especially as she catalogues the absurdities of life and leisure under late capitalism.
It is extraordinary to read a book in which no single word is wasted. The brevity of the prose results in a page that is hot to the touch. The novel seems to suggest that if a person stays in any one place, she will get burned. The narrative thread does not advance conventionally, but roams, seemingly unsystematically, as it reexamines earlier occurrences. In writing All My Goodbyes, Dimópulos seems to have taken to heart Walter Benjamin’s (another of her translational subjects) remark: “He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth.” The whorling time in the novel is authentic to the expatriated citizen’s experience of how the present is often ruptured by undercurrents of the past. The destabilizing sequence of events illuminates Dimópulos’s commitment to portraying a new global citizenship characterized by interruption, dispersal, and disruption.
Dimópulos has spoken about the “silence of dictatorship.” The impact of military rule in 1980s Argentina on her and her narrator’s generation cannot be overstated. While the author does not draw explicit connection between the country’s legacy of political violence and the narrator’s pilgrimage across Europe, the history of her origin can be detected in what she does not say.
The novel’s central plot point, the murder—a word first mentioned on page ninety-nine—is refused pride of place. Rather than front-load the crime (á la such procedural powerhouses as CSI and Law and Order) or reserve it for the climax, Dimópulos stows it away in the middle, where we might never find it again.
And yet, it is never entirely far from mind.
The local newspaper’s crime section reveals the murderer to be a “known outlaw,” hands cuffed in the accompanying photo. It is reported to have been “a hit… organized in advance.” Though the case is plainly stated, somehow, the clarity of the resolution is less than satisfying.
The narrator continues to call the murders “alleged.” She explicitly likens them to “all [her] goodbyes,” coyly noting that she, too, leaves people for dead. In recounting the events preceding the murder, she records that the victim’s “life is at stake and he doesn’t know it.” The narrator is in possession of the information. The chilling artistry of the sentence lies in the fact that it is not clear when she knows, whether the present tense situates us in the present or the past.
Guy Debord’s 1955 term “psychogeography” distinguishes purposeful walking from drifting. The trouble is, it is not clear which she is doing. Is her silence precautionary? As a witness and not an actor, the narrator is irreproachable. As readers, we object to a narrator, especially a woman, who refuses to divulge what she knows; we distrust her reticence.
At one point, an old woman is distraught to find her necklace missing, a string of pearls upon which the narrator has recurrently fixated. The narrator is questioned, to no avail; the white gulf of a scene break engulfs her reply. This silence, and others, exert an unsettling power, an inconclusive verdict we have to live with.
In the final two words of the novel, a character promises to be somewhere “without fail.” By this point, we already understand that a promise is senseless, that a sworn pledge is cheap, that failure is ever possible. We already know that this character will never arrive. - Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/mariana-dim%C3%B3pulos/
“Reminiscences of self are reminiscences of place,” writes Susan Sontag in her essay on Walter Benjamin, ‘Under the Sign of Saturn’. “The work of memory,” she goes on, “collapses time.” It makes a ruin of chronology, creates the space for a topographical and forever fragmented reading of what has passed.
Buenos Aires, Madrid, Málaga, La Mancha, Almagro, Barcelona, Heilbronn, Heidelberg, Berlin, Athens, Los Golondrinas. In All My Goodbyes (trans. Alice Whitmore), a novella by Mariana Dimópulos (who has herself written a critical study of Walter Benjamin’s work), each of these sites of memory is cut loose from chronology, becoming a piece of a puzzle from which reader and narrator attempt to decipher the history here described.
For Sontag, via Benjamin, “a book is not only a fragment of the world but itself a little world … [and] the best way to understand [it] is also to enter [its] space”. To enter the space of All My Goodbyes is to cross a threshold into a broken world. “I had as many pieces as a broken vase,” relates the book’s unnamed narrator, “and I never found a way to put them back together or even to number my porcelain remains.” Like forensic archaeologists, we sift through the debris left behind by the narrator’s restless European years: the people and the places; the serial, menial jobs; the budding relationships; the houses that could have been made a home. All abandoned. “These are all my crimes: all my goodbyes.”
‘And to the very last: doubt.’iA young woman leaves her home and family in Buenos Aires and spends the next decade travelling across Europe. “Why, or to what end? Sometimes I don’t know.” The daughter of a physicist – “a well-intentioned butcher of innocence” – she is instructed by him in the habit of scepticism: “The blue of the sky? Just an effect of the Earth’s atmospheric gases and the light of the sun; “Precambrian stones are fundamentally no different to the wings of a fly. … [Stone] simply holds its form for a longer period of time”; “Rest is a form of movement”; “[S]trictly speaking, nowhere existed anywhere.”
All My Goodbyes is, in part, an interrogation of the relationship between time and space. As such it captures the paradox inherent in the physical world as we currently understand it. Carlo Rovelli describes this in his Seven Brief Lessons on Physics:
A university student attending lectures on general relativity in the morning and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon might be forgiven for concluding that his professors are fools … In the morning the world is curved space where everything is continuous; in the afternoon it is a flat space where quanta of energy leap.The structure of All My Goodbyes echoes that of quantum mechanics, in which the flow of time and the curvature of space give way to quanta, or “grains of space and matter [that] no longer contain the variable ‘time’”. According to Rovelli, these “materialize in a place … [only] when colliding headlong with something else”. Hence the narrator’s father’s insistence that, “strictly speaking”, nowhere exists and that rest is a form of movement. Reality – space and time – takes shape in movement, via interaction.
The paradox is that both theories work remarkably well.
By this reading, the fragmented nature of All My Goodbyes is not simply that of a postmodern non-linear narrative. There is nothing simple about this novella. Its narrative is not fragmented only because the work of memory makes a ruin of the forward flow of time. Yes, the narrator is remembering what she describes as her “pilgrim years”. Yes, she is working to piece together her “porcelain remains”. But the brokenness of her narrative is not solely a reflection of the frailty of memory. Reality is broken, in the sense that it is composed of grains of space that, in Rovelli’s words, “cannot be ordered in a common succession of ‘instants’”. This novella captures the unnerving experience of scientific doubt – a contagious sense, which the narrator learned early from her father, that the world is not what it seems. Dimópulos’s protagonist has not found a way to restore the instants of her experience, to make her history whole again, because there is no chronology – only leaps from one event to another and suggestive interactions between them. Only arrival and departure.
‘My pilgrim years’
A young woman leaves her home and family in Buenos Aires and spends the next decade travelling across Europe. “I … regarded myself as incapable of sleeping in a bed, sitting in a chair, inhabiting a room, for too long.” Over the course of her pilgrim years, the narrator of All My Goodbyes moves restlessly between cities, jobs, relationships. Playing first at being an artist (“what young people do when they’re in Madrid and they’re Latin American”), and then (briefly) a tourist, she becomes in her restlessness a kind of secular pilgrim, a perpetual foreigner who – according to the logic of global capital with its insatiable demand for cheap migrant labour – works as a shelf-stacker at Ikea, a parts-sorter at a used-car factory, a maid-of-all work at a hotel et cetera.
In her book, Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit argues that pilgrimage is “one of the fundamental structures a journey can take – the search for something, if only one’s own transformation”. Citing anthropologists Nancy Frey and Victor and Edith Turner, Solnit is particularly interested in the ways in which the experience of pilgrimage affects the pilgrim’s perceptions of time, space and self. According to Frey, pilgrims “develop a changing sense of time”. Likewise, for the Turners, as paraphrased by Solnit, pilgrimage is “a state of being between one’s past and future identities and thus outside the established order, in a state of possibility”.
The liminality of the pilgrim’s experience, that state of being between – including, perhaps, mid-leap between one quanta event and another – is similar in important ways to Valeria Luiselli’s experience of being permanently “alien”, a “non-resident in New York”. In ‘Other Rooms’, one of the essays in her collection Sidewalks, Luiselli relates conversations with doormen who “are usually emigrants of some kind, metaphorically, if not literally”. These men inhabit the threshold of residential buildings across New York, the kind of liminal space and time that pilgrims take to the road in search of. As such, and like the narrator of All My Goodbyes, they understand the need to keep moving, the imperative to interpose oneself between strange places. As Luiselli tells it:
What you have to do, [the doorman] said … is to get out of here as often as you can. That way you get to know yourself better. Only come back to have a bath and eat, never to sleep, because the more often you spend the night in different places – rooms, pensions, hotels, borrowed couches, other people’s beds – the better. … We should all participate in a certain amount of housing polygamy if we want to be true to the millenarian edict: Know thyself.The possibilities of liminal space – of being at the threshold between arrival and departure – are, it seems, a contributing factor in the desire for perpetual movement. This threshold space cannot be pinned down in time – it hasn’t happened, as such, but is always in a state of becoming. Hence, Benjamin’s celebration of being in movement. Like those other rooms of Luiselli’s essay, for Benjamin, “space is … teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours”.ii Cross the threshold, decide to stay put in place, and time works its dark magic. What was possible instead becomes a constraint.
Reminiscing about the cities in which she resided during her European years, the narrator of All My Goodbyes describes the effect of time on her experience of a place:
The arrival – from dinner, say, or from the supermarket. The setting of the handbag on the floor. The glance around the room. What is that chest of drawers, that bed? What is that rug (if there is a rug)? What are those curtains? Suddenly the chair is archaic, there is no use for it. The bedroom is abandoned, the bathroom and its mirrors incomprehensible. How can it be abandoned, I wonder, if until so recently it was my very own room? […] And yet, it has all become unfathomable to me. Did I really think I’d been living within these four walls this whole time? It was just an illusion. A lacklustre magic trick, utterly profane.Time alienates the narrator from place perhaps because, even when she has come to rest, it continues to move relentlessly forward. And yet, her reminiscences, which move against the forward flow of time, collapse chronology and position the narrator in a way her physicist father would have considered impossible.
Throughout the novella, the narrator and the people with whom she interacts attempt to make sense of her perpetual movement. As she tells it:
If I stay, I stay. If I go, I go. This thought was soothing in the beginning, but then it wasn’t anymore. In the beginning I’d just think something logical, and it would calm me down. In the beginning I’d just say ‘it’s logical’, and I’d feel perfectly fine. I moved around logically, from one new city to the next, one new bedroom to the next. And it worked the other way, too: if I stayed, I stayed because it was rational to do so. But soon my reasons grew like a bouquet. In Berlin and Heilbronn, I spent my time contemplating all the rational flowers, morning and night. I call them flowers, but I am suspicious of my own words; if I’d really had a bouquet of reasons, I would have wanted to count them and pull all their petals off. But my reasons had no petals, and no perfume.What are these reasons with neither petals nor perfume that the narrator seeks to identify and then destroy? Several are suggested throughout the novella: the need to leave home; the desire to avoid the “rodent wheel of real life”; the inability, as Blaise Pascal would have it (in the epigraph with which the book begins), that human beings are ill-equipped to “stay quietly in their own chamber”; the narrator’s “mean spirit”, her avoidance of introspection, her compulsion to move on to the next thing and the next and the next; and the fact of our elemental make-up, “we know from our hydrogen and our oxygen that we are water as well as dust. And water runs.”
In Berlin, Julia – a trauma therapist with whom the narrator lives – diagnoses her “suitcase syndrome”. In Heidelberg, the narrator marries Alexander and ‘imagined that he could be reason enough [to stay]. … Those imaginings cost me nothing. And sometimes I delighted in them secretly, like a stowaway, knowing full well they would never become a reality.” Ultimately, and in keeping with the novella’s sceptical strain, the quest for finding a reason, for making reliable sense out of the narrator’s restlessness, is itself rendered doubtful. “What is ‘solved’?” asks Benjamin in his 1928 essay, One-Way Street.
Do not all the questions of our lives, as we live, remain behind us like foliage obstructing our view? To uproot this foliage, even to thin it out, does not occur to us. We stride on, leave it behind, and from a distance it is indeed open to view, but indistinct, shadowy, and all the more enigmatically entangled.
Returned to Buenos Aires, recalling her pilgrim years, the narrator of All my Goodbyes would pluck the petals, thin the shadowy foliage of the view of her past, number and restore the pieces of her porcelain remains. But if there was a solution to the question of her perpetual movement, she’s left it behind. And because there is no way of reordering her history chronologically, the events of her life, as she has lived it, must remain puzzlingly entangled.
‘A good slave’ A young woman leaves her home and family in Buenos Aires and spends the next decade travelling across Europe. She plays at being an artist, then a tourist, but eventually becomes that cornerstone of global capital, a (female) migrant worker from the South in service to the North. Employed as a maid-of-all-work in Berlin, the narrator of All My Goodbyes tries “to wipe that sad, servile smile off [her] face … in vain”. In Heidelberg, where she is one of many Ikea shelf-stackers (confined, as her Turkish co-worker would have it, by the laws of “modern slavery”), she comes to understand that
we were Ikea shelf-stackers. We behaved like obedient planets each spinning in our own orbit, according to the gravitational laws of our boss. From kitchenware to interior decoration, from the arrangement of plates to sheets, via every imaginable prerequisite for the perfect European home.Again, at an auto-parts factory – which was, in keeping with the experience of Southern and feminised labour, a forty kilometre bus ride from the city of Heidelberg – a Polish co-worker describes the narrator as “a good slave”, to which: “First I’m offended, then I defend myself; much later, I concede defeat.”
The emphasis throughout All My Goodbyes upon the fraught relationship between the North and the South makes this novella an apposite commencement to Sydney-based Giramondo Publishing’s new ‘Southern Latitudes’ series. According to the Publisher’s Note, this series “bring[s] together writers from the southern hemisphere”, among them Ashleigh Young (NZ) and Marcelo Cohen (who, like Dimópulos, is from Argentina).
In this novella there are numerous threads to the interrogation of the North-South dynamic. The question of labour is central to the narrative and extends beyond the hemispheric to incorporate economic migrants from the Global South – Eastern European, Turkish, Southeast Asian et cetera. Of one of her lovers, Stefan (via whom she eventually returns to Buenos Aires), the narrator reports:
He talked about how they manufactured teacups in Cambodia which sold for a pittance in Australia and Singapore. About the Australians who bought them in the supermarket, and then donate[d] twenty cents to a UNICEF campaign at the register. Didn’t I think this was magnificent? Wasn’t our world a work of art?The persistence of colonial conceptions about – and uses of – the South also resonates throughout the book. At a picnic in Heidelberg, the narrator encounters a man “who apparently hadn’t been informed of my origins (‘aren’t you Turkish?’) [and] was busy disparaging the politics of Latin America.” She goes on:
He’d travelled to several countries in the Americas and had confirmed for himself the backwardness of our ideas and the corruption of our institutions. … In the wake of my cultural superior’s comments, a very civilised discussion unfolded on the triumphs of liberty and reason, and although a few of them revealed, like an unstitched hem, the guilt behind their Nazi past and the misdeeds of colonialism, to which Europe still owed a great deal of its wealth and progress, the group as a whole seemed terribly satisfied with themselves and with their cordial, democratic world.According to this logic, Europe continues to stand for freedom, reason and civilised enlightenment; the South for corruption, emotion and stunted development. The narrator sees through this. She can see the burden of Europe “weighing heavily” upon Alexander’s shoulders, the way that, when he speaks of “European traditionalism”, of freedom and social security, he uses words “that [crawl] out of his mouth like tiny insects”, and is forced to “rub his lips to prevent them from stinging him”. She sees this because she understands the true relation of freedom to slavery: “My freedom always implies the slavery of another. So, my heart asks (and at heart I’m no good): if I enslave myself, does that mean someone else is set free?”
There is, over the course of the narrator’s pilgrim years, a curious form of self-enslavement. Unlike many migrant workers from the South, she is not bound by the need to send money home. She is trained as a biologist, has a job in the family business back in Buenos Aires and, in Germany, is frequently offered the opportunity to find work at a university or in a research laboratory. Is she slumming it? This is one of the novella’s questions that remains unsolved. Certainly, the narrator is keen to assure the reader of her “mean spirit” and the narrative is stitched together by her persistent refrain that “at heart, I’m no good”. There is in her need for perpetual movement a suggestion of Benjamin’s melancholic temperament, that particular “faithlessness” that leads to “eternal voyaging”.iii Likewise, there is a suggestion of the pilgrim’s desire “to make their journey harder, recalling the origin of the word travel in travail, which means work [and] suffering”.iv
As much as she labours alongside other foreign workers, the narrator remains separate from them. At Ikea, her Turkish and Latvian co-workers subvert their enslavement via escalating acts of sabotage – they break plates, stain sheets, rip the ears from soft toys. “Many mornings,” the narrator remembers, “on my way to work, I resolved to join forces with the Turk and the Latvian, to praise their sabotage with my primordial tongue and convince them of my potential work. I tried and I could not.” Thus, the narrator is “a good slave”. She enslaves herself and finds a kind of freedom of movement in the uncertainty of migrant labour. Unlike the Turk and the Latvian, and the makers of teacups in Cambodia, the narrator is free to be in perpetual movement, in the leap between this event and the next. In Berlin, at the point of becoming “sealed and approved”, she throws her residency card into the river. “[T]hat night,” she later recalls, “was the most triumphant of all, because I had nothing in my pockets, not even my own name.” Being bad at heart, she chooses to remain undocumented at the threshold of arrival and departure.
‘Place exists’ And yet, a woman, no longer young, returns to Buenos Aires after a decade spent travelling across Europe. Her father has died, but she is unable to remain among her brothers and their families and continues to move, this time to Patagonia, to a farm near Los Golandrinas. Here she takes a job as a fruit-picker and falls in love with Marco, a man “happily tied down” to “his life on the mountain”.
In One-Way Street, Benjamin suggests that “in a love affair, most people seek an eternal homeland”, and it is in love that the narrator of All My Goodbyes believes that she has “finally found [her] place”. “The planet has stopped spinning. And I’ve stopped with it.” Love counters physics and scientific scepticism. Come to rest, the narrator comes also to believe that
my father had lied to me. The little house [on the mountain] … was irrefutable proof of this. For the first time in my life I could sit and recline without a shred of scepticism, trusting completely in the resilience of chairs and beds. Anyone could come along with their science now and refute the evidence of my nights and days. … Because love exists and the place exists.Reality takes shape in interaction. Not, in this instance, the interaction of perpetual movement, but the interaction of the event of love. In this place, time – the past and the future – also exist. In love, Marco and the narrator “promise each other something akin to the future” and at Los Golondrinas the narrator begins to look back upon all her goodbyes. “I was there,” she says, “to swallow the bitter pill of my love for those distant people I’d left for dead, so many years ago.”
In love, come to rest at Los Golondrinas, the narrator believes that she has become “whole”, that she has a chronological past, present and future. But the world is granular. It takes shape via the perpetual movement between “all [her] crimes: all [her] goodbyes”. And, given that this is a narrative reminiscence, the narrator’s world ultimately takes shape in the violent light cast by the brutal crime that is committed at Los Golondrinas:
After all my travels, all those years lost and won and lost again; after testing a thousand times the raw stock of my being, which never seemed to cook; when at last I had found a man and I had loved him, they called me up so I could see how the story ended: the living room covered in blood from wall to wall, the ransacked house, the abandoned axe.‘An eternal homeland’ A woman rests in an apartment in Buenos Aires. Having “lost [her] flair for the art of flight”, she finds a home in “the atomic number for silicone, … the properties of butane gas”, in which she can “relax and stretch out … as if in a great armchair”. She takes solace from copying out the periodic table, which, unlike her broken vase, gives a reliable order to the interactions between elements. And from her armchair – in her state of rest, which is also a form of movement – she remembers herself in place. She tries to find a way to restore the pieces of a puzzle about time and space and pilgrimage and slavery and freedom and love and violence. A puzzle about arrival and departure. - Anna MacDonald
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/porcelain-remains-review-goodbyes-mariana-dimopulos/
At the age of 23, the unnamed narrator in Argentinian writer Mariana Dimopulos’ terrific debut English novel “All My Goodbyes,” abruptly leaves Buenos Aires, her potential career as a scientific researcher, and her odd physicist father, in order to travel in a “simple and erratic circle across the globe.”
For the next 10 years the narrator (who calls herself Lola in Barcelona, Luisa in Malaga) juts from to Spain to Germany to Tunisa, searching for a place to call home. But she repeatedly torpedoes her own efforts: after she falls in love and marries the kind-hearted Alexander, she boards a train. After securing legal work status and planning a life with Julia and her young son Kolya, she packs two bags and leaves in the middle of the night.
“Once the last door has closed, once we’ve survived the last victory, we board the train or a taxi or a tram and we deliver ourselves to an age-old chagrin, forged in gold and silver, that we cherish like a precious coin. The new is always the same.”
After her father dies, the narrator makes her way back to Buenos Aires, but this city, too, cannot retain its hold and she slips down south to Patagonia for work on a berry farm. It is here, in a small farm house where she’s regularly visited by dogs and sheep, that she finally allows herself to feel a sense of rootedness. But once she decides to stay, two gruesome murders propel her back into a tailspin, causing her to reflect back on travels, loves, and all her previous goodbyes, which she refers to as her “crimes.”
Beautifully written and expectantly structured, “All My Goodbyes” weaves together the narrator’s various memories and trials in a pattern not beholden to geography or linear time. This unusual juxtaposition of stories and quick slips of memory results in some surprising emotional punches, as well as larger questions surrounding the nature of memory and our human desire for connection.
A novel that is both scientific in its distance and philosophical in its insight, “All My Goodbyes” is a marvelous, introspective work. - Laura Farmerhttps://www.thegazette.com/subject/life/books/review-all-my-goodbyes-20190126
In 1907 after living and writing in Europe since he was a young man, Henry James, aged a pinch below 60, sat down at his desk in New York and decided that that writing a novel was like looking through a self-made aperture of a “million-windowed” mansion. Inside was society’s dirty secrets and the position of the viewer glaring at these peccadillos was to frame its revelation. For Argentinian novelist and translator Mariana Dimópulos the house of fiction has become a rotting abode in a decrepit suburb. Not a stately Victorian home but a grotto; one flipped inside out to reveal yellowed bones grafted on as exoskeletons. Europe is stagnating. In All My Goodbyes, the main character’s (who remains unnamed for the entire novel) is listening to her boyfriend give:
“..extremely valid reasons (valid because they were his) why I should continue living in that den of European traditionalism, with its 500-year-old houses and its balconies dripping with flowers. He mentioned books, the peace and quiet, the university. If you found it hard to think, you could just head to the forest or to Italy, which served as something of a last resort for all melancholy Germans. The age of travelling the world and marvelling at other people’s poverty was over. And yet he still felt the weight of an entire continent on his shoulder” (p. 87).
She has no such weight and so moves like a leaf down a windswept strabe. She is the Antipodean answer to the centre, unweighted by its shifting traditions. Her character arrives in a Europe to find, disappointingly, that that culture has long been exhausted. She looks through the window, winces and chooses to voice no response, and moves right along.All My Goodbyes is a short novel where the nameless main character wishes to escape Argentina to Europe. In the Continent she enters into a peripatetic existence, almost as if she were trapped in sleepwalking and returns to Argentina and then to the far south of Patagonia where she becomes embroiled in a brutal axe murder. Dimópulos’s touch-stone writer seems to be Thomas Bernhard and she has mastered and extended the Bernhardian mode: the controlled raving is accented and solidified by a non-linear ordering of the chronology, giving the structure a Cubist presentation. Her mastery is apparent as the reader is never confused as to where in the chronology the action is occurring. This structure relieves the characters of the burden of time as the Cubist narrative does not progress towards the final act (the killing of her lover and her lover’s mother) but the scenes are broken up and then grouped thematically. The structure of Dimópulos’ language supports the complexity of her protagonist’s crossing of European borders. A recognisable refrain in the syntax of the novel is heard when the final clause of a sentence or paragraph cancels out the truth that was asserted by its opening subject. The following examples illustrate this self-contradicting parataxis:
“They asked me for help and I told them there was no way I was going into the sea to rescue their horrible ball. That last bit is a lie. Nobody ever asked me anything” (p. 19).
“I could cross over to one side and say one thing and then cross over to the other side and believe the exact opposite.” (p. 31)
“It’s not true that we leave a place when the future is adorned with beautiful visions of faraway travels. We leave one morning, the morning after any given evening or the afternoon after any given midday, just when we’d decided to stay forever.” (p. 84).
“He removed his scarf, tied it around my next. We hugged and I promised him so many things: that I’d come back, that I loved him, all of them lies.” (p. 114).
One of the main character’s various jobs is at IKEA. Here she finds Europe in its purest form: sterile, easy to digest, useful and entirely supported by the labour of non-Europeans – a place where people go for the “narcotic” effects of a state of “pleasantness” (p. 42). It’s ironic that she is working here because IKEA represents the very thing that she wants to avoid – usefulness: “Being useful is of no use to me” (p. 14.) To deepen the irony, in a country where the language is not her own, she simply exists and language no longer serves a purpose. When she works in a German bakery she is frequently agitated as her German vocabulary is riddled with gaps, leading to misunderstanding between her and the boss, and the customers. This leads to her not knowing the German word for “jar” and her trying to break one in frustration but the jar rolls along the floor and still doesn’t break. So that “[a]t that moment, more than ever, I despise the Germans’ world-famous quality-assurance standards” (p. 91). Her constant movement is to avoid the pressure to perform a pejorative and menial task, which has been forced upon her both because of her Argentinian heritage and her gender. Without this language ability she comes across to all Germans as someone with no inner life. She pushes back as, “my tongue, as we all know, was still asleep in its Spanish dream” (pp. 62-63).What she seems to be searching for is a community that is based on recognition. A place where the people recognise and accept her. Europe does not recognise her according to this logic. And she can not find it at home in Argentina either. In the wilds of Patagonia her identity exists in a state of perpetual flux as she is not even sure if she herself was not the one who used the axe to hack apart her lover Marco and Marco’s mother, Lady Dupin. Perhaps she is guilty, perhaps not. She certainly, like Ivan Karamazov, feels an ideological guilt for the crime that occured. Saying goodbye is her ideology, even if it means accommodating the death of her lover to render this scene impossible for her to re-enter, either in time or space. She accepts no responsibility for any one and she asks for none in return. She will never have the community that she longs for as she accepts that she has nothing in common with anyone else. She barely has anything in common with herself. She only accepts that her lover has become truly unknown when he can only become expressed in the past-tense:
“I never saw any of them again. I never spoke to any of them again, never replied to any of their messages. I put an end to them all, I didn’t leave a trace, didn’t feel a trace of remorse. There are all my crimes: all my goodbyes” (p. 140).
All My Goodbyes is an astonishing novel. It situates itself to the novel and to Europe with a level of sophistication that is, sometimes, lacking in Australian fiction. The translation of this novel by Giramondo contributes to the Australian literary ecosphere, and is to be celebrated. Particular mention must go to the translator, Alice Whitmore. Whitmore has successfully shepherded this novel from its Spanish language mode into an English language mode while maintaining the prose’s Spanish language strangeness. She does this by maintaining a near pitch-perfect tone throughout.- Jeffrey Errington
http://mascarareview.com/jeffrey-errington-reviews-all-my-goodbyes-by-mariana-dimopulos/
After all my travels, all those years lost and won and lost again; after testing a thousand times the raw stock of my being, which never seemed to cook; when at last I had found a man and I had loved him, they called me up so I could see how the story ended: the living room covered in blood from wall to wall, the ransacked house, the abandoned axe. What was I supposed to say?
Given that the unnamed narrator–protagonist of Mariana Dimópulos’s All My Goodbyes (Cada despedida) has difficulty putting together and understanding her own fractured, nomadic life, it is perhaps not surprising that we readers have to call on all of our faculties to reconstruct her narrative – but it is well worth the effort. It is often a challenge even to know where we are in time because of the constant shifts from present to past, but this fragmentation contributes to a sense of timelessness – or to the unimportance of time – in this novella where the past is remembered from the present and where place matters more than time. This, too, calls for a focused reader alert to every verbal nuance and tense shift, and willing to assemble the narrative jigsaw. Spare a thought for the translator, Alice Whitmore, whose task it was to convert this Spanish puzzle into an equally enthralling English one – and who does so magnificently. - Lilit Thwaites
www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2018/216-january-february-2018-no-398/4535-lilit-thwaites-reviews-all-my-goodbyes-by-mariana-dimopulos-translated-by-alice-whitmore
You Are in the Middle of Time: An Interview with Mariana Dimópulos
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Mariana Dimópulos and Alice Whitmore
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete