Sergio Ramírez - Passion, money, sex, gossip, political intrigue, medical malpractice and judicial corruption all merge into a novel that reads like a courtroom drama wrapped in yellow journalism disguised as historical fiction posing as a scandal of the first order

Sergio Ramírez, Divine Punishment. Trans. by Nick Caistor with Hebe Powell, McPherson & Co., 2015.

Upon its original publication, Carlos Fuentes declared Divine Punishment to be the quintessential Central American novel. In this, the greatest work of a storied literary career, Sergio Ramírez transforms the most celebrated criminal trial in Nicaraguan history—the alleged murders in 1933 of two high society women and his employer by a Casanova named Oliverio Castañeda—into an examination of the entire Nicaraguan society at the brink of the first Somosa dictatorship. Passion, money, sex, gossip, political intrigue, medical malpractice and judicial corruption all merge into a novel that reads like a courtroom drama wrapped in yellow journalism disguised as historical fiction posing as a scandal of the first order.

“Divine Punishment is by far the best novel by Sergio Ramírez, former vice-president of Nicaragua, and one of my favorite novels, period. Set in the Nicaraguan city of León in the 1930s, and based on a true story, it concerns the case of Oliverio Castaneda, a young charmer and social climber accused of killing neighbors, patrons, and lovers by poisoning. The convoluted affair (still used as a case study in Central American law schools) was never solved, and Ramírez himself cagily leaves it open-ended. Hilarious, riveting, beautifully constructed and written.” – Dan Bellm

“... Ramírez extends Flaubert's techniques to a whole society, which becomes a true microcosm of Central America, for although located in Leon, Nicaragua, the action reverberates in Costa Rica and Guatemala. . . . Melodrama is comedy without humor. Sergio Ramírez returns the smile to the newspaper serial, but in the end this smile freezes on the lips—we are back in the heart of the darkness. Between the fullness of comedy and the imminence of tragedy, Sergio Ramírez has written the great novel of Central America—the novel that it was necessary to have in order to reach an intimacy with its peoples, to visit the edge between their traditional recalcitrance and their potential for renewal. . .”—Carlos Fuentes

“As with the works of Henry James, Divine Punishment is an epic of consciousness. But unlike them, the consciousness stirred here is not individual but collective ... Sergio Ramírez draws one of the most formidable portraits of bourgeois hypocrisy ever written in Latin America...”—Tomás Eloy Martinez

“...the main character is language, as well as the entire society of the city of Leon. . . . [Divine Punishment] is a poetic novel, as well as being dramatic and pathetic, and tragic, humorous, macabre, romantic, realistic, and political . . .”—Ernesto Cardenal

Ramirez, former vice president of Nicaragua, published this noirish tale of murder and deceit while in office in 1988, and it appears in English for the first time in a wonderful translation by Caistor. The story, based on a real series of unsolved poisonings, takes the form of a legal case, replete with court reports, interviews, testimonies, depositions, and letters from the main players. This interesting and complex structure includes a barrage of character names, places, subplots, and substories—Ramirez effectively recreates an entire world of intrigue around the case. But the central story line revolves around the motives of the accused murderer, Oliverio Castaneda. Ramirez animates the small town world of 1930s Leon, Nicaragua, and its criminal justice system at a time that coincides with the country’s struggle to operate under a civil and judicial, rather than military, government. The fictionalized version of Castaneda’s crimes are driven partly by love and revenge and partly by his desire to control a large financial fortune. The novel also ratchets up the tension between the curiosity of a nosy media and the public’s nearly insatiable appetite for a scandalous trial. This is a big, beautiful novel—a compelling historical drama of competing narratives and colorful characters that is self-aware and tinged with black humor. The author’s afterword and translator’s note provide helpful context for American readers. - Publishers Weekly

Divine Punishment is closely based on an actual criminal case and prosecution in 1930s León, Nicaragua's second city, when Oliverio Castañeda, then in his mid-thirties, was tried for murder. Months after the sudden death of his considerably younger wife, in February, 1933, two members of the Contreras family also died in quick succession: older daughter Matilde (on 2 October), and pater familias Don Carmen, a successful businessman (on 9 October). Castañeda had ingratiated himself with the Contreras family, but after Don Carmen's death suspicion fell on him having poisoned the man and his daughter -- and his own wife.
       Ramírez's novel is in many ways documentary in character -- but not straightforwardly so. Much of the narrative relies on what is presented as verbatim testimony from the trial and hearings, along with other documentary material -- though almost always woven into the narrative rather than left stand-alone. It does not unfold neatly chronologically, instead circling back over events, facts, and testimony again and again, Late into the novel, one chapter is even presented entirely in the form of a fictional account of events as written by local journalist Rosalío Usulutlán -- a succinct fictional take and résumé of the case that then, given its finger-pointing spin as to what happened, becomes part of the proceedings as well.
       While the first chapters set part of the stage -- focusing on the poisoning of some local dogs using strychnine, which is presumed to be the poison Castañeda also then used in his murders, and possibly explains how he got his hands on it -- and the situation he finds himself in is already addressed early on, including in an interview of the then-jailed Castañeda by Rosalío Usulutlán after his October 1933 arrest -- Ramírez presents the story in such a spiraling roundabout way that the third section of the four-part novel, well over two-hundred pages in, begins by re-stating the obvious and long-known:
     On Monday, 9 October 1933, on the sudden death of Don Carmen Contreras, one of the most celebrated cases in the judicial history of Nicaragua began. It is to the many complex events surrounding this trial that the book is devoted.
       Occasionally, Ramírez even explicitly reminds: "At this point we have to leaf back through a few pages of our calendar of events", but the entire novel is one of reconstruction -- the past repeatedly revisited, from different vantage points and in different lights.
       In presenting the facts, as they were known, and the unfolding events, Ramírez offers not a neatly built-up mystery, but rather a much more true-to-life legal procedural, with all the conflicting reports and recollections, and the uncertainty about so many of the details. There's little doubt that Castañeda is a killer, but both proof and understanding remain difficult to ascertain.
       Set in a Nicaragua just freeing itself from US occupation, the backdrop includes a young director of the National Guard, Anastasio Somoza (who would effectively take power a few years later, ruling Nicaragua for some two decades) -- a significant if shadowy presence in the case's final resolution --, and the Central American politics of the time do loom over the novel, as the foreigner Castañeda also faced trouble (and was suspected of murder ...) in his own homeland, Guatemala.
       A compatriot who knew Castañeda in his younger days describes him as: "an incorrigible fantasist", and repeatedly Castañeda tries to reframe the narrative being spun around him to his own advantage, trying to present himself, and his actions, in ways that may fit the facts but suggest an entirely different scenario leading to them. In interviews, testimony, and letters he, like many accused, argues he, and his actions, are being seen and interpreted in the wrong way; in particular, he tries to paint a different picture of himself -- difficult to do, in the case of this arrogant man who has always dressed in dark mourning clothes, since the death of his mother when he was a teen. Something of a charmer, the hold he appears to have over the various Contreras women -- mother and both daughters -- doesn't help his case, neither the gossip about their relationships nor, ultimately, the support the surviving Contreras women provide, at least for a while. His late admission that the Contreras he was most intimately involved with was María ("my common-law spouse, since I have had marital relations with her"), hardly comes as a surprise, but is part of his final effort to assume control of what is by then a trial-narrative. (Born in 1918 -- some seven years younger than her sister -- María was only fourteen when her relationship with Castañeda began, and still only fifteen when her father and sister died and Castañeda brought to trial.)
       As one newspaper article writes about the Contreras family -- though it applies to the story as a whole --:
This family, overwhelmed by a tragedy that seems to know no end, seem to be living through a drama straight from the pages of Aeschylus.
       As so often in Greek tragedy, there is also no neat, happy resolution; indeed, Castañeda's fate seems ultimately left up to the fates: it is not the almost incidental trial (just one part of the much larger trial of public (etc.) opinion Castañeda faces) which determines what becomes of Castañeda -- while the actual events surrounding the final resolution remain also cloaked in mystery.
       Late in the novel the author's presence is acknowledged, as he mentions collecting some information -- and even speaking with some of those involved -- decades after the fact. (A short Afterword describes the circumstances surrounding the writing of the novel a bit more closely.) Long-buried information comes to light -- the material that allows Ramírez to reconstruct the case, half a century later -- but some answers remain elusive.
       Divine Punishment is a chronicle of (apparent) murder and the prosecution of the man presumably responsible, but it's also a portrait of the society and structures of that time. Among the conflicts that form part of the narrative is the ongoing one between two of the local doctors, who take very different positions regarding the causes of death (and the proper assessment of the post mortem evidence) -- a charged relationship between mentor and student that shifts as the case progresses. Though arguably provincial, this León is not some simple backwater town; among the interesting dynamics are also those between the local establishment and the outsiders involved in the case (notably the judge and, of course, Castañeda).
       Even as so much documentation is presented in Divine Punishment, Ramírez's novel does not feel simply documentary; it is not a simple case-account or procedural. Yet Ramírez also scrupulously avoids taking advantage of his authorial position in guiding readers to specific conclusions: even as the unpleasant Castañeda's guilt can hardly be questioned, Divine Punishment remains in many ways a murky tale (appropriately sinking in particularly dark mire in its resolution, and Castañeda's fate).
       All in all, it's an unusual piece of fiction: part legal-criminal thriller, part period-piece, often with a subversive little humorous touch, Divine Punishment doesn't conform to many expectations, but proves, in going its own (distinctive, roundabout) way, successful in its own right. - M.A.Orthofer

When Sergio Ramírez published a book this spring about his experiences as a leader of the Sandinista revolution, he called it ''Adiós, Muchachos,'' or ''Goodbye, Boys.''

The title was appropriate because several years ago Mr. Ramírez quit the Sandinista movement and dropped out of politics. He is pursuing a literary career that has won him renown not only in Latin American but in Europe and beyond. Few would argue with the judgment of a Nicaraguan critic who recently asserted that he has become ''one of the most distinguished figures in Spanish-American literature.''

In Nicaragua, where Mr. Ramírez helped lead the leftist and highly controversial Sandinista Front for nearly two decades, he is now almost universally admired. His books are best sellers, crowds gather when he speaks and reviewers gush over his work. His Web site (www.sergioramirez.org.ni) is among this country's most popular.

Few nations treat their writers with such emotion. Mr. Ramírez is Nicaragua's latest literary star in a line that stretches back to the passionately beloved poet Rubén Darío, who died in 1916.

''People in this country are proud of their writers,'' Mr. Ramírez said. ''Literature is not marginal here.'' Sitting in his book-lined study in Managua, where pre-Columbian artifacts take up one shelf and opera CD's another, Mr. Ramírez, 59, seemed at ease with his new life. ''These days I see myself as a writer, and if I have opinions they are a writer's opinions,'' he said. ''I can't deny or get away from the fact that I was part of a political process that deeply divided this country. When I'm asked a question, I answer it. But my active political life is over.''

Mr. Ramírez has been a writer for most of his adult life, but until the mid-1990's he balanced writing with revolution. Now he does little else but write and occasionally teach. His most recent novel, ''Margarita, Está Linda la Mar,'' has a title that Nicaraguans instantly recognize because the phrase is the opening line of a famous Darío poem. The book won the 1998 Alfaguara Prize in Madrid, an honor that bestows not only considerable attention but also the equivalent of $175,000. Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist, headed the jury.

The novel is written in Mr. Ramírez's typical style. He takes events from Nicaraguan history, which is unusually turbulent and colorful, and adds imaginary characters and situations.

The book interweaves the story of Darío's last years with that of a poet born after his death, Rigoberto López Pérez, who assassinated the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza García in 1956. A stream-of-consciousness sentence describing the fatal gunshot takes up more than a page.

The novel remains faithful to events, and an appendix tells what later happened to historical figures in the book.

These days Mr. Ramírez is working on a novel set during more recent Nicaraguan history. It will open, he said, with a chilling episode that occurred in May 1979, when the Sandinista rebellion was reaching its peak. A squad of Sandinista fighters captured a former adviser to the dictatorship near his beach house, and then set him before a crowd. He was made to plead for his life, and told that if the crowd applauded his appeal, he would be spared. But the crowd was unmoved, there was no applause and the prisoner was summarily executed.

''I recognize that this may have been a bad man, but what happened that day was awful,'' Mr. Ramírez said. ''This man and his fate have a sort of symbolic resonance in our history.''

In the early 1970's, Mr. Ramírez was a young writer in Berlin. When he read about the gathering revolution in his homeland, he returned and soon became one of the most articulate leaders of the Sandinista Front, which led an armed rebellion against the Somoza family dictatorship and later formed a government friendly with Cuba and the Soviet Union. Told to choose a pseudonym, he picked Balthazar, because at the time he was reading Lawrence Durrell's novel of that name.

Mr. Ramírez was part of the junta that governed Nicaragua after the Sandinista victory in 1979, and from 1985-90 he was vice president under Daniel Ortega. After the two were defeated in their re-election bid, they became political rivals. Mr. Ramírez ran for president in 1996, finishing with few votes and many debts.

Today he is much in demand as a guest professor and takes temporary posts at institutions ranging from the University of Maryland to the Free University in Berlin. His newest nonfiction book is a collection of lectures he gave in Mexico on the arts of writing and reading, called ''True Lies.'' (An English-language excerpt is available on his Web site.) During a recent author's reading at a Managua bookshop, he also offered advice to budding writers.

''Books are not written on tables at cantinas or in cafes or by sitting around telling people what you're writing,'' he said. ''Books are written in absolute solitude, in isolation. You write books by writing, by hours of work as if you were a monk. There is no way to create literature other than work, work, work, and then by creative correcting, by seeing what is good and what's bad. You have to have the cold courage of the surgeon and cut what doesn't work. Realizing what isn't good is the writer's hardest job.''

Despite his success, only snatches of Mr. Ramírez's work are available in English, and at least one deal with a large New York publisher has fallen through. Next year Curbstone Press, in Willimantic, Conn., is to publish an English version of ''Margarita, Está Linda la Mar'' as ''Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea.''

Mr. Ramírez's bookshelves hold mostly classics, from Cicero and Virgil to Cervantes and Dante. Of 20th-century writers, he especially admires Faulkner.

''Faulkner's style never stops influencing me,'' he said. ''The atmosphere of the American South is very much like rural Nicaragua.'' - STEPHEN KINZER

For Sergio Ramirez, poet, author and vice president of Nicaragua's revolutionary government, the mixing of art and politics is first and foremost a question of logistics.
Every day, between an early-morning jog and arrival at his Managua office, the Sandinista leader spends 2 1/2 hours at his personal computer tapping out novels. On an official visit here last week to meet with outgoing President Miguel de la Madrid and President-elect Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Ramirez squeezed in time to plug the latest fruit of this early-morning labor, a 450-page novel titled "Divine Punishment."
"I divide my time between literature and politics," Ramirez said in an interview before introducing the Mexican edition of his book at the Rufino Tamayo Museum. "I think I have managed to work in the two areas without allowing either one to prejudice the other."
But if he had his druthers, Ramirez said, if war-torn Nicaragua were back on its feet, the Sandinista revolution stable and safe from attack, the vice president would leave his government post to dedicate himself full-time to literature and leading a workshop for young writers.

"If I had the opportunity," he said, "I would only be a writer."
His newest book is a fictionalized account of a high-society triple murder in the provincial city of Leon in 1933 and of Oliverio Castaneda, the handsome and charismatic lawyer convicted of the killings.
While some critics at home charge that Ramirez meant the story of murder and adultery to portray a pre-revolutionary elite as immoral, Ramirez says there was no political motive for writing the book.
"This is the story of an interesting individual, a character. If I weren't vice president of Nicaragua, no one would pay any attention to the political elements of this. . . . I would have written this book even if I had never been a leader of the revolution," he said.
Nicaragua's political opposition, including its most prominent poet, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, has long accused the Sandinistas of making the arts subservient to the revolution, of confusing literature with propaganda.
Ramirez disagrees. He says the Sandinistas have never dictated what subject authors should address or what form their work should take. There is no "revolutionary recipe," he said, pointing to his book, which borrows in style from traditional thrillers, soap operas and old-style newspaper serials.
Nonetheless, as in the rest of Latin America, authors and artists have great prestige in Nicaragua and have long served as a social conscience for the country. Nicaragua's most famous poet, Ruben Dario, wrote protests against U.S. imperialism early this century. Like Ramirez, many Sandinista authors are directly involved in politics: Poet Ernesto Cardenal is the Sandinistas' minister of Culture and President Daniel Ortega's wife, Rosario Murillo, is a recognized poet.
It also was a poet, Rigoberto Lopez, who in 1956 assassinated the dictator Gen. Anastasio Somoza Garcia, father of Gen. Anastasio Somoza Debayle, whom the Sandinistas ousted in 1979. That assassination took place in the same hall in Leon where Oliverio Castaneda's trial had been held before overflow crowds.
The Castaneda case was famous in Nicaragua in the 1930s and was nearly folklore by 1959 when Ramirez entered law school at the University of Leon, 25 years after his protagonist. In Leon, mothers commonly told the murder tale to their children, who often relived it in vivid nightmares. But Ramirez first learned the details of the Castaneda case in a criminal law class.
Charming Young Lawyer
The facts were the following: Castaneda, a native of Guatemala, moved to Leon, where he made a name for himself as a charming young lawyer and was said to have engaged in extramarital affairs with several local society women.
On Jan. 13, 1933, Castaneda's wife died suddenly of unknown causes. He moved in with the well-to-do Gurdian family. That October, one of the daughters, with whom he reputedly was having an affair, also died suddenly. A week later, her father died.
Castaneda, who was known to have bought strychnine from a pharmacist to kill wild dogs, was arrested and charged with murder in the three deaths. His lengthy trial captured the imagination and emotions of Nicaragua, which split over the question of his guilt. Women and the poor particularly were convinced of his innocence.

Already drawn to literature and studying law only at his father's insistence, Ramirez immediately saw the story's potential for a novel. Politics and a popular insurrection intervened, however, and nearly 30 years passed before Ramirez completed the work. He obtained the record of Castaneda's trial in 1980, a year after the Sandinista victory, and finally found time to take up the yarn in 1984, following his election as vice president. He finished in October, 1987, and "Divine Punishment" was published in Nicaragua and Spain last April.

Controversy erupted anew with the publication, including charges from critics who felt that it was insensitive of Ramirez to revive the painful case for members of the Gurdian family who are still alive. The book was serialized in the newspaper, forums were held and, once again, Nicaragua was divided over the Castaneda case.
Although no proof was presented, Castaneda was convicted of the crimes on circumstantial evidence and sentenced to die, but before his execution he was shot to death by jail guards, allegedly while trying to escape.
Over the years, Castaneda's name has remained a household word in Leon and even the source of local humor. Before she died, his wife was rumored to have cried, "Olie, Olie, what have you given me?"--a line echoed by many in jest when feeling ill.
Agustin Prio, owner of the Casa Prio ice cream shop (who appears in the opening scene of the book), said in a telephone interview that elderly women who visit his nearly 100-year-old parlor still argue Castaneda's innocence. Some people believe that the lawyer's killing was political, he said, as Castaneda had been an outspoken opponent of the Guatemalan dictator at the time, Jorge Ubico. They said Ubico had his friend and fellow dictator, Somoza Garcia, kill Castaneda for him .

"I knew Castaneda. He had a personal magnetism, his gestures, his intelligence, his education," the 75-year-old Prio recalled. "I couldn't believe such an intelligent man could be involved with murder."
In the end, Prio said, he was convinced of Castaneda's guilt by "the eight days" separating the death of the two Gurdians.
Ramirez said he, too, became convinced of Castaneda's guilt, although he does not take a position in "Divine Punishment."
In Spain, the book has won critical acclaim. Mexican author Carlos Fuentes wrote in the Spanish newspaper El Pais that Ramirez has written "the great Central American novel" and compared the work to French author Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary."
Ramirez said his Spanish publisher currently is negotiating the English-language rights with a U.S. publisher. Two books by Ramirez--a volume of short stories and a novel titled "To Bury Our Fathers"--are available in translation in the United States.
Mexican author Hector Aguilar Camin called the book a social mosaic that recreates the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie in the 1930s, with details such as Kelvinator refrigerators, Underwood typewriters and the 1932 Charles Laughton murder-suspense movie "Payment Deferred," from whose Spanish title, "Castigo Divina," Ramirez took the title of his novel.
"It is an extraordinary novel," Aguilar Camin said in an interview. "What is surprising is that a politician of this level has written a book this good." - MARJORIE MILLER

Sergio Ramírez, A Thousand Deaths Plus One, Trans. by Leland H. Chambers, McPherson & Co., 2009.

In 1987, while on a state visit to Warsaw, the author happened upon an exhibition of remarkable works by a hitherto unknown Nicaraguan photographer, Juan Castellón, who plied his craft in Europe between roughly 1880 and 1940. This improbable discovery launches Ramirez on a consuming quest to reveal the forgotten artist's identity -- an obsession that eventually takes him from Nicaragua to Vienna to Mallorca, and leads him to sift through the evidentiary remains of a raffish entourage of European and Latin American madmen, nobles, adventurers, and poets. Meanwhile, in alternating chapters, Castellón tells his own side of the story, from his fantastic conception in Nicaragua, to an education in France courtesy of Napoleon III, to nights of debauchery in the company of his compatriot-in-exile Rubén Darío, to a final and unexpected residence in a Nazi concentration camp. A Thousand Deaths Plus One is a coruscating novel that recapitulates, in the biographical snapshots of an exceptionally ordinary man, the history of the exceptionally unfortunate, not to say "nonexistent," country of Nicaragua.

"With this compulsive masterpiece, Sergio Ramírez will enchant American readers as he has been delighting us in the Spanish-speaking world for many years. Through the quest for an elusive photographer, Ramírez reveals and celebrates the history of Nicaragua, but indeed of the whole Western world in the last two centuries, and does so in ways that are as entertaining as they are profound." — Ariel Dorfman

Nicaraguan author Sergio Ramirez's fragmented, multinarrated—and at times frustrating—novel recounts a quest to recover a mysterious photographer's past. In 1987 Warsaw, an unnamed narrator becomes obsessed with a photographer named Castellón when he stumbles upon an exhibit showing the same scenes before and during the Nazi occupation. He learns that Castellón was Nicaraguan and took the photos while traveling with the Nazis, who had murdered his daughter and son-in-law. From here, the book shifts to Castellón's own voice as the story moves back and forth in time, connecting Castellón to luminaries such as Chopin, George Sand, Turgenev and Flaubert. Although an intriguing look into Nicaraguan history—as well as Europe between 1870 and 1940—the constantly shifting narratives and occasionally stiff translation make this novel difficult to navigate. Still, those who stick with the literary puzzle are likely to come away with a new understanding of Nicaragua and its culture.- Publishers Weekly

Sergio Ramírez's A Thousand Deaths Plus One, translated from Spanish by Leland H. Chambers, interweaves historical fact with outrageous fiction, painstaking truth with barefaced lies. In the novel, author and narrator become indistinguishable, memoir and invention collide, and the reader becomes wrapped in a complex net of interlocking anecdotes. A Thousand Deaths Plus One is what critics tend to call a "novel of ideas," but as with any great piece of writing, its rich conceptual structure does not mean that it lacks humor, compassion, or other less esoteric elements of human experience.

The novel is divided into two sections, each beginning with a chapter attributed to another major Latin American author. The first is ascribed to Rubén Darío, Nicaragua's beloved national poet and the father of Latin American Modernismo (which, perplexingly to the Anglophone reader, is the stylistic opposite of literary modernism in English, resembling instead the baroque prose of Ramírez's novel). The second credits Colombian novelist and journalist José María Vargas Vila, known for his aggressive critiques of imperialism and conservatism. The very first words of the novel thus thrust the reader into an elaborate literary game in which truth and fiction are indistinguishable.
Ramírez was vice president of Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega, and the framing narrative of A Thousand Deaths Plus One involves a diplomatic trip—in this case, a journey to Warsaw in 1987—on which the fictionalized author discovers an exhibition of work by an obscure Nicaraguan photographer, Juan Castellón, whose photos serve as a documentation of modern European history. Fascinated by the images, Ramírez delves into the life of Castellón, who seems to him "like a character who should be in a novel." Much of the book is formed around the photographer's narrative, which gives an account of his father's life as well as describing his own. This device ties Nicaragua irretrievably to Europe, slotting it into the broad sweep of Western history, where it is usually invisible. Thus, just as Ramírez echoes the Cervantine technique of confusing author and narrator, he has also written a national novel analogous to Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.
The history of the Nicaraguan nation, as experienced by Castellón's father, is one of obscurity, and vulnerability to the whims of more powerful nations. As the hapless diplomat tries to persuade European aristocrats that his own narrow nation, rather than the more commonly proposed Panamanian option, is the better place to build the canal that will link two oceans, few of them can even find the country on their maps. The construction of the canal farther to the south dooms Nicaragua to universal oblivion, and the grandiose dream of transforming the nation from "a huge cattle ranch where flies were always buzzing around, if not bullets" into a nation of consequence on the world stage, fizzles out.
Yet A Thousand Deaths Plus One presents ways to remedy that obscurity. The novel is about how history is recorded—in official accounts, in old black-and-white photographs, in novels of ideas by former vice presidents—and about the labyrinthine links that tie major and minor narratives together, making them indistinguishable from each other. The confusion of fact and fiction, Ramírez suggests, is as endemic to history as it is to literature, and the story of an impassioned Nicaraguan spreading out maps before an imprisoned king is as consequential to the history of one nation as the building of the canal eventually was to another. Still, the documentation of history itself helps shape the content of historical narratives. As the narrator tells the photographer's grandson near the end of the novel, "If Castellón had not taken that picture, you would not exist for me."
As a parade of historical figures and anecdotes rushes past, the reader is left uncertain which elements of the novel are fictional and which based in fact. This sense of disorientation, one begins to think, would be appropriate in any encounter with either fact or fiction, as both are inevitably present in either. Even Castellón's photographs, it turns out—although we tend to accept the realism of documentary photography as being somehow the same as its reality—are not as straightforward as they appear. Throughout the novel, Ramírez also undermines exalted historical and cultural figures and established histories—presenting Darío as a raving drunk and Flaubert ravaged by syphilis, describing Nicaragua as an uncivilized backwater and Europe as a decadent imperialistic power— and thereby calls into question the grand myths upon which national identities are constructed. This weakens the myths and transforms the identities of the nations or historical figures themselves since, in being pulled down to a more human and realistic level, they are made sympathetic despite their faults and frailties.
This ambitious novel is unfortunately hampered somewhat by its translation. The exaggerated excess of Ramírez's prose is challenging to render elegantly in English, whose literary traditions are so much less forgiving of elaborate sentence structures and elevated language. Although Chambers does an adequate, even admirable, job for such a complex text, the translation nevertheless contains a steady supply of jarring syntaxes and odd word choices. Mil y una muertes, the Spanish original, is clearly a beast of a book from a translator's point of view, and it's a shame the translation was not more diligently edited.
Still, A Thousand Deaths Plus One is an intriguing and provocative novel and well worth a look. While it poses profound philosophical, cultural, political, and historical questions, its reliance on first-person narratives and human anecdotes keeps it from becoming abstruse. Ramírez has created an intricate work of literature that strains against the strictures of fact and fiction. And just as apparent fact can turn out to be fiction, fiction can reveal fundamental truths. - Andrea Rosenberg

A Thousand Deaths Plus One pieces together the story of a photographer named Castellón. It is presented in two parts, 'Camera Oscura' and 'Camera Lucida', each of which opens with a piece attributed to another author: the first an account by Rubén Darío (who plays a central role in Ramírez's Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea), the second -- 'The Drunken Faun', about Darío -- by Colombian author José María Vargas Vila (1860-1933). The remaining chapters alternate between Ramírez's own account of how he comes across this mysterious photographer and searches for additional information about him, and another first person autobiographical account that one assumes is Castellón's own. There is some an overlap between the pieces attributed to Darío and Vargas Vila and Ramírez's journey of discovery, as well as Castellón's own reality; indeed, Castellón figures prominently in the Vargas Vila-piece. It all has the feel of an elaborate literary game of the sort that Enrique Vila-Matas and Javier Marías are fond of playing. 

       Darío's short sketch includes the observation:
For my part, I contemplate him as if this were a matter of a photograph before turning over the page in an album.

       Ramírez, of course, can only rely on photographs (and writing, with its similar turn-the-page quality) when trying to get a sense of these various historic figures, and this contrast between real-life and the image that is fixed in photographs (or writing) is a central part of the story.
       Ramírez appears simply as himself: at one point he writes about working on Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea, and many of these trips he takes to Europe are on business, in his official capacities. It is when he is in Warsaw in 1987 that he stumbles across an exhibition of 'Castellón the Photographer in Warsaw', in which the photographs are paired up, to show the same scenes not as before and after, but rather as: Before the Nazi Occupation and During the Nazi Occupation . It is the immediacy of being a witness to history that seems to appeal to Ramírez: Castellón does not merely document the consequences but is in the midst of them, and what is central is not just the final outcome but rather what happened. Later he is even more specific:

the artist is a pathologist who must preserve the dried-up pieces in the formol-filled flasks of his memory; any other way would be to take on the role of redeemer. They can be stripping the skin off your own mother, your own daughter, but your duty is to register the fact. 

     Perhaps (Castellón would probably say now) after having taken the photograph of the naked body, being neutral consists in seeing one's own self as an object, even at the moment when, before penetrating her, the syphilitic digs around inside a prostitute's vagina with fingers that are moving there to learn something about the sensations of the touching, but as if they were not his own, the artist who may infect another body with his own but does not infect the page or negative.

       Castellón becomes a sort of obsession of Ramírez's over the years -- "He never stops fascinating me, like a character who should be in a novel", he admits to someone at one point -- and he slowly accumulates bits of information about him. It is a neatly interlinking set of coincidences that mesh together, from the fact that the photographer was also Nicaraguan to connexions that include Chopin, George Sand, Turgenev, and, of course, Rubén Darío, much of which Ramírez stumbles across on his various trips over the years.
       The historical accounts -- presumably Castellón's own, focussed especially on his father's efforts to obtain support for the building of the canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific through Nicaragua, rather than in Panama -- are a nice contrast that also link with the larger picture Ramírez is building up. One of the difficulties with convincing anyone to build the canal in Nicaragua is that so few seem even to believe in the country's existence -- or can find it on a globe.
       Castellón's photographs are documentary evidence of history, but his account (and Ramírez's) are, of course, far more uncertain; much of what Castellón reports is hearsay, for example -- as readers are nicely reminded when he completes a scene and notes: "What I wouldn't have given to be able to take that picture !" (Of course, he has taken that picture -- but only using words, which are inherently far less reliable .....) Castellón's account turns out not to be exactly what it seemed either ("But very faithful", Ramírez is assured ...). And even Castellón's photographs -- especially those final ones -- are open to some interpretation, especially as to his own role and place.
       A Thousand Deaths Plus One is an elaborate fiction that stakes itself firmly in the real. A fascinating set of stories and bits of history, it also neatly addresses the issue of capturing history and human fates, in photographs or in writing -- both documentary and fictional.
       Well worthwhile. - The Complete Review

 Originally published in Spanish in 2004 this is the most recent novel by an author generally agreed to be among the foremost Latin American literary figures at work today. Nicaraguas premier living writer Sergio Ramirez has played an important role in the countrys intellectual and political history for decades: he led the Group of Twelve who sparked the 1979 Sandinista revolution against the Somoza regime and subsequently became vice-president of Nicaragua a post he held until political differences with President Daniel Ortega prompted him to retire from government. Since 1963 he has published thirty works of fiction and nonfiction but only a few have been translated into English.

As one might expect of a man whose books have won many major awards A Thousand Deaths Plus One is an accomplished novel ably translated by Leland H. Chambers. Intricate and initially somewhat baffling it weaves together three basic storylines all anchored in the first person which skillfully evoke the history of Nicaragua over the past century and a half even though much of the action is set in Europe.
The framing device describes the author himself in the recent past as he becomes fascinated by an early-twentieth-century Nicaraguan-born photographer named Castellon. Castellon tells the story of his own family beginning in the mid-nineteenth century when English French and American interests vied to build a canal across Central America. Panama was ultimately chosen as its site but for a while Nicaragua was under serious consideration and thus attracted more attention from the Great Powers than its culture and development would ordinarily have commanded. Ramirez introduces memories of Castellon from sources of uncertain reliability. This combination of perspectives creates a hall-of-mirrors effect raising questions about truth identity and narrative-both literary and historical.
Many and perhaps most of the characters are actual figures: Prince Louis Napoleon (later Napoleon III); William Walker an American mercenary who tried to create a private empire in Nicaragua; national poet Ruben Dario; and Castellon himself who roistered through Europe until he wound up in a Nazi concentration camp as an old man. These tales unfold in an offhand often elliptical style mingling storytelling literary history psychology and philosophy in a thought-provoking though sometimes rather opaque fashion.
This is decidedly literary fiction of greatest appeal to readers who can leap with the author from Chopin to Turgenev to the Central American jungle to Mautthausen. Those who are familiar with Ramirezs next-most-recent novel in translation Margarita How Beautiful the Sea will have an idea of what to expect: serious yet playful challenging and rewarding writing for anyone who wants to sample the best of todays Spanish-language fiction. -  Teresa Scollon 

Reminiscent of Borges in its maze-like complexity of shadowy figures and surreal situations, A Thousand Deaths Plus One is as unpredictable a work as it is intricate in construction. Sergio Ramirez’s novel is essentially a work of intrigue. In 1987 the author found himself in Warsaw on a state visit. Ramirez was vice-president of Nicaragua from 1984-1990. This visit to Europe serves as the fuel that feeds the plot of the novel.
While in Poland’s capital, Ramirez, who doubles as the narrator, discovers the work of a compatriot photographer named Juan Castellon. Castellon, he is pleased to discover, had worked in Europe from 1880 to 1940. The author becomes curious as to the identity of this Nicaraguan photographer and the circumstances that brought him to Europe. The action of the novel begins with this otherwise inconspicuous revelation. The animated plot sequences and narration oscillate between Ramirez’s description of the world around him, his psychological desire to understand Castellon and Nicaraguan history, and Castellon’s own part in telling his side of the story.
 A Thousand Deaths Plus One is a complex fictional yarn that does not easily telegraph its punches. Employing occasional Borges-like narrative techniques: “I believe I recall, but this could be a fabrication of my memory...” the author weaves a multi-layered story that after a while makes it next to impossible to separate truth from fiction. As it turns out, Castellon, who came to Poland in 1929 by way of Barcelona, was a friend of the Nicaraguan writer Ruben Dario. This friendship serves as a vehicle to introduce cultural and historical snippets of that Central American nation, or what the author refers to as “a country that does not exist.” As a form of storytelling, this entanglement works very well. Only pedants will concern themselves with the historical authenticity of the events and characters that Ramirez unveils or concocts, as the case may be.
The story traces both the author and Castellon’s exploits throughout Europe, and how these eventually are linked to their homeland. Without question, Ruben Dario, the poet and originator of the Spanish-American literary movement known as Modernismo, serves as the link between the author and his main character.

Also of considerable interest is Ramirez’s use of a prologue and epilogue in the novel. The former is by Ruben Dario, while the latter, which is much more interesting, is Castellon’s seemingly final clarification of the events of the novel. The use of an epilogue as a literary technique brings to mind the brilliance of Miguel de Unamuno in his majestic nivolas, novels in which he employed similar tropes. Perhaps appropriately, A Thousand Deaths Plus One ends with a dream sequence where Castellon tells us, “And my final recollection then is that of a dream. Last night I dreamt I had returned to Nicaragua in some future time, at the end of the century.” This closes the circle of A Thousand Deaths Plus One, as it were, by releasing Castellon into the pen of Ramirez, as author/narrator. - Pedro Blas Gonzalez

Sergio Ramírez, Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea, Trans. by Michael Miller, Curbstone Books, 2007.

León, Nicaragua, 1907. During a tribute he delivers during his triumphal return to his native city, Rubén Darío writes on the fan of a little girl one of his most famous poems, "Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea."

In 1956 in a cafe in León, a group of literati gather, dedicated, among other things, to the rigorous reconstruction of the legend surrounding Darío-but also to conspire. There will be an attempt against dictator Somoza's life, and that little girl with the fan a half-century before will not be a disinterested party.
In Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea, Sergio Ramírez encompasses, in a complete metaphor of reality and legend, the entire history of his country. The narrative moves along paths fifty years apart, which inevitably converge. The story becomes a fascinating exercise on the power of memory, on the influence of the past, fictitious or not, in the finality of reality.

Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea is centered around two of the most significant Nicaraguan figures of the first half of the twentieth century, the great poet Rubén Darío and the dictatorial (and dynasty-founding) Anastasio Somoza, president of Nicaragua from 1947 until his assassination in 1956. The title already suggests the peculiar everyone-knows-everyone smallness of Nicaragua, as it refers to to the lines Darío wrote on the fan of the young daughters of doctor Louis Henri Debayle upon his triumphal return to Nicaragua in 1907. Debayle 'treated' Darío in 1916, when the poet died, while one of the Debayle-daughters, Salvadorita, would go on to marry Somoza (and eventually become the Nicaraguan 'first lady').
       The novel shifts back and forth in time, with much of the focus on the plot to assassinate Somoza. It begins with Darío's return to Nicaragua in 1907, then echoes that in the ship-journey bringing some of the conspirators planning to kill Somoza to Léon in 1956 -- with a long-lost statue of Darío aboard as well, a second homecoming for the poet.
       Around each man there are myths that blur reality: as they note long after his grand funeral, Darío may have been a famous figure but was perhaps better known for his celebrity than his work:
     "All because he was adored like a saint. Everybody in Nicaragua knew his poetry by heart from having read it so much," Captain Prío said. 
     "In fact, his poetry had hardly been read at all in Nicaragua, Captain," Rigoberto said, checking his journal. "According to Customs' records, the total number of books imported in 1906 was one thousand three hundred twenty. How many of those were Rubén's ? No one knows. Perhaps not even fifty of them. And not one of his was printed here."
       Meanwhile, Ramírez also offers a handy Somoza-chronology, noting that Somoza already asked for Salvadora's hand on the very day of Darío's funeral (with papa Debayle turning him down) and then went on to work as a meter-reader and outhouse inspector before slowly achieving greater success (and winning the doctor's consent to marry Salvadora).
       For the most part, both Darío and Somoza aren't in the best of physical condition, with Darío constantly overindulging in alcohol while Somoza doesn't even have an asshole -- "They removed it at the Oschner Clinic in New Orleans, and never put it back" (i.e. he had a colostomy). But then neither has very long to live .....
       There's a large cast of characters here, some bridging both eras. It's a very colourful cast, too, many referred to by nicknames, such as The Alligator Woman (whom the fingers-in-everything Dr. Debayle 'helps' -- at Somoza's behest -- with a sex change operation, which, of course, merely results in yet another Debayle-debacle) or Darío's ex-wife, La Maligna (who truly does malignantly haunt him). The horrific experimentations of Debayle, representative for what the state can mindlessly inflict on its citizens, are fairly prominently placed -- and include the heart-wrenching scene of Darío's death at his hands, the poet pleading to another physician: "Doctor, save me from this barbarian". And for grisly comedic relief there's Debayle's removal of Darío's brain -- bigger than any he's ever heard of before -- and the ensuing struggle for ownership .....
       Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea shifts back and forth in time and place, a quilt of stories and dialogue. Darío takes a central (if often inebriated) role, while Somoza is deservedly peripheral, repeatedly glimpsed but barely focussed on. There is a play that is set to be produced, with some of those involved in it also figuring prominently in the story, but it is a book full of the orchestrated and planned, as if these were all plays, from Darío's 1907 return to Nicaragua to the unveiling of his statue decades later -- and, of course, to the carefully planned assassination of Somoza. Much goes wrong and is improvised, but the feel of attempting to script history -- small and large -- is present throughout.
       Sliding around as it does, the narrative can be frustrating to follow, but for the most part it is quite riveting. Yet Ramírez almost seems intimidated by the absurdity of many of the coincidences and occurrences, and while he (entertainingly) presents those facts that are stranger than fiction he sometimes seems to back off in the areas of pure invention.
       A fascinating story, and a fairly winning mix of fact and fiction. - The Complete Review

Sergio Ramírez, Adiós Muchachos: A Memoir of the Sandinista Revolution, Trans. by Stacey Alba D. Skar, Duke University Press Books, 2011.

Adiós Muchachos is a candid insider’s account of the leftist Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. During the 1970s, Sergio Ramírez led prominent intellectuals, priests, and business leaders to support the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), against Anastasio Somoza’s dictatorship. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza regime in 1979, Ramírez served as vice-president under Daniel Ortega from 1985 until 1990, when the FSLN lost power in a national election. Disillusioned by his former comrades’ increasing intolerance of dissent and resistance to democratization, Ramírez defected from the Sandinistas in 1995 and founded the Sandinista Renovation Movement. In Adiós Muchachos, he describes the utopian aspirations for liberation and reform that motivated the Sandinista revolution against the Somoza regime, as well as the triumphs and shortcomings of the movement’s leadership as it struggled to turn an insurrection into a government, reconstruct a country beset by poverty and internal conflict, and defend the revolution against the Contras, an armed counterinsurgency supported by the United States. Adiós Muchachos was first published in 1999. Based on a later edition, this translation includes Ramírez’s thoughts on more recent developments, including the re-election of Daniel Ortega as president in 2006.

"In this poignant memoir, Ramírez extols the idealism of the youthful Sandinistas, too many of whom fell as martyrs in their bloody battles against the tyrannical Somoza dynasty. At the same time, he recognizes the many errors the inexperienced revolutionaries committed once in power." - Richard Feinberg

“The English translation of Sergio Ramírez’s 1999 memoir allows the reader a fascinating entrée into the life and work of one of Central America’s most compelling personages and leading writers. This excellent translation of the former revolutionary junta member and vice president of Nicaragua’s 1998 book offers a fine introduction, filled with indispensable insights into the romance and tragedy of the revolution.” - Jeffrey L. Gould

“This is an analytically astute if, to say the least, idiosyncratically organized account of the Sandinista Revolution (both and before and after the fall of Anastasio Somoza Debayle). For those who consider the author one of the most thoughtful commentators on his country’s political life, the book is a treasure, and well worth close examination by scholars interested in Latin American political history in general and the history of revolutionary change in particular.” - Andrew J. Kirkendall

“Beyond being a valid and interesting source, Ramírez is also an accomplished writer, whose literary skill shines through in every detail of the memoir. . . . In short, a lot can be learned from this book that transcends history and present day affairs. Adiós Muchachos provides the reader with inside knowledge of revolutions, global politics, and human aspirations. And perhaps the best gift this book offers is the opportunity to learn while enjoying a great read.” - Contemporary Sociology

“Adiós Muchachos is an extraordinary memoir of the origins, triumphs, and ultimate decline of the Sandinista Revolution. It is written by Sergio Ramírez, one of Nicaragua’s and Central America’s leading literary figures and an influential politician and statesman during the crucial decades he discusses, the 1970s through the 1990s. Few memoirs of the Sandinista period treat the movement’s ultimate defeat from a critical perspective, and fewer still have been written by one of that period’s leading political actors, let alone crafted in such an engrossing fashion, with such an eye for intimate political and cultural detail.”—Gilbert M. Joseph

Sergio Ramírez is a leading (and much underappreciated, in the United States) Latin American writer; Adiós Muchachos is a memoir, but often feels more like a work of fiction than documentary history. Ramírez shifts back and forth in time, and repeatedly shifts focus. A detailed Chronology does list the significant events and provides a useful timeline, while Ramírez is more focused on color and personalities.
       The Sandinista-led Nicaraguan revolution overthrew the ultra-corrupt Anastasio Somoza in 1979, with Ramírez going on to serve as the country's vice-president from 1985 to 1990. While then still American president Jimmy Carter was generally supportive of the new regime when the Sandinistas took over, his election defeat to Ronald Reagan in that year's election led to a very pro-active anti-Sandinista American policy and support for the anti-government Contras (culminating, of course, in the shameful Iran-Contra debacle). Ramírez notes that: "Anti-imperialism was always the most profound expression of the Sandinista movement", and suspicion of the US -- long supportive of Somoza-dynasty that ruled the land for decades -- was naturally high from the beginning; disagreement was, Ramírez notes, inevitable ("They were the source of everything that had gone wrong in our history") and Reagan's messy and debilitating intervention was also hardly anything new or unexpected:
No other country in Latin America had been the victim of as many abuses and military interventions by the United States as Nicaragua.
       American assistance, or at least a more or less hands-off neutrality, would certainly have made things easier, but Ramírez wistfully notes that, regardless of the American position, the Sandinistas were woefully unprepared for the necessary political and economic overhaul of the nation that for so long had been essentially the fiefdom of a very few privileged families -- much less wholesale implementation of their radical (and, as he admits, in many respects unrealistic) program. From some of the failed large-scale projects to the bumbling of Pope John Paul II's visit to the conservatively religious nation in 1983 he describes much that didn't go quite (or at all) right: typically, grandiose projects like one he favored, an ambitious plan for a coast-to-coast broad-gauge railway, soon petered out for want of funds or expertise -- in the case of the railway, after a mere seven kilometers of track were laid. Yes:
Plans were obsolete before they were put into practice, and the model for the centralized economy turned out to be little more than an idea.
       The one lasting legacy Ramírez is particularly proud of is the widespread acceptance of democracy -- beginning with the smooth transition following the 1990 elections, in which the Unified Nicaraguan Opposition party defeated the heavily favored FSLN (the ruling Sandinist National Liberation Front). Ramírez's account of the surprising defeat of his party offers a variety of explanations -- from mistakes they made to the American invasion of Panama, shortly before the election -- but he still seems to have difficulty getting over the surprise; with hindsight, though, he acknowledges that the proof that democratic principles and procedures could be embraced and tolerated by all might well have been worth the price.
       Adiós Muchachos meanders about a bit, and introduces -- generally very fleetingly -- a large cast of characters and martyrs, situating it uncomfortably between a very personal account for insiders, intimately familiar with the who and what, and a more general historical overview. Philosophically realistic about many of the revolution's failings (in particular the attempts at imposing a planned economy), and not nearly as bitter about the subversive activities of both locals and foreign powers (most notably the US), Ramírez's account does offer considerable insight and many points of interest, but it is neither detailed nor critical enough to be a definitive account of even just his role in the revolution and the government -- a shame, because he certainly has the stories to tell, and he's a writer who could tell them well. Perhaps still too close to the subject matter, it doesn't feel like his heart is entirely in it here, as he takes stabs at conveying different significant times and events, but shows a somewhat limited follow-through, not daring or willing to dig deeper. - M.A.Orthofer

Dodie Bellamy – Language squirms like a living thing, dense and gelatinous; texts filled with metaphors stretched beyond the breaking point

Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004)

"A fixture in the San Francisco literary scene for over a decade, Dodie Bellamy will surpass the expectations of her many fans with this book - which traces a woman's relationships with three very different men and her involvement in 20th-century vampire culture. This is a nearly indescribable epistolary novel that brings the heroine of Bram Stoker's Dracula forward into the acronymic age of MTV, HIV, ATM, VCR, etc."

"This book is the culmination of a posession, a spirit that haunted San Francisco a decade ago. Bram Stoker's heroine inhabited the body of Dodie Bellamy and wrote letters to Dodie's friends, who were also writers, some of whom were also posessed. Unlike the book Real: The Letters of Mina Harker and Sam D'Allesandro, in which the letters of Mina alternated with those written by Sam, this book is solely composed of letters written by Mina Harker. We hear one side of the conversations, but there are echoes on the line." - Queer Book Reviews

"I do not mean I perform-see my swiveling neck my changing mouth, arms that open wide-a tremendous pile of meat that sings 'I love you'-then I explode." People used to say that a poem should not mean, but be. Today, we might better say that a text should not mean, but perform. Dodie Bellamy's novel, The Letters of Mina Harker, is such a performative text. It's not what this book says that matters, so much as what it does. It dances its way through the minefields of female desire. It steps lightly from spot to spot, even as explosions detonate all around it. It cuts a swath through language and life alike, shattering identities wherever it goes. Warning: this text is dangerous, it bites.
On one level, The Letters of Mina Harker seems to be about certain events in Dodie Bellamy's life. The book speaks of her marriage to "KK." It narrates her tumultuous affairs with two other men, whom she calls Dion and Quincey. And it movingly memorializes Sam D'Allesandro, her close friend, now dead of AIDS. All of Dodie's relationships are described in intimate, sometimes embarrassing, detail. No secret is too private to reveal, no event too trivial to recount, no emotion too fleeting to be analyzed in depth. Most of all, the book is about Dodie's sex life. It feels as if every erotic fantasy, every twinge of jealously, every last orgasm, has been transcribed into the word processor and pinned down on the page. And the realistic vividness of all these happenings is only enhanced by the fact that they are set against the background of everyday life: domestic chores, art world gossip, and recognizable scenes from San Francisco during the Eighties.
Yet despite all this, The Letters of Mina Harker is not a confessional text. Even if the facts it recounts are true (which may or may not be the case), it isn't an autobiography. This is because The Letters of Mina Harker is, above all, a book of and about writing. It's a verbal performance, not a series of revelations. In this postmodern reinvention of the epistolary novel, the story itself is relegated to the past. The present tense of the book is the time in which its letters are written. These letters are addressed to the Reader, to the dead Sam D'Allesandro, and to other lovers and friends, fictive or real. Unlike in traditional epistolary novels, these letters can never receive replies. They are rather like messages in bottles, urgent communications sent out with no hope of return.
The only thing truly present in this text is a voice; or better, a pair of hands typing. The novel's main character is not Dodie Bellamy, the woman to whom all these things happened. Rather, it is the narrator, Mina Harker, the one who actually signs and sends the letters. Mina is a ferocious vampire woman, the undead companion of Count Dracula. She is not Bram Stoker's compromised Victorian heroine, but a fiercer, harsher, more independent figure. Mina haunts Dodie, possesses her body, takes her outside of herself. For writing, like falling in love, is like falling prey to a vampire. The person who yearns, like the person who writes, is taken over by an alien entity. She finds herself acting in all sorts of ridiculous, dangerous ways. She finds herself saying things she does not mean. The writer, like the lover, is a vessel for outside forces, a host for a ghostly parasite, an echo chamber for voices of the dead.
The aim of confessional writing is to achieve an absolute transparency: to get through the words, and arrive at life itself. But Dodie Bellamy knows that this is an impossible task. Life and writing can never coincide. Each thrusts repeatedly against the other, without success. At best they may trade places, as in a perpetual dance. "Writing versus life-is the one flight, the other hot pursuit?" The body cannot be spoken in its entirety. Sex is forever beyond language, or before it: "my cunt has lips but no tongue it clenches dilates and drools but will never speak." To write about something is necessarily to transform it: to distort it or embellish it, but in any case to lose it. Experience is always being exchanged for words, and body parts for parts of speech: "there's metaphor on one side and literality on the other and I'm stuck between them two mountainous silicone tits crashing against one another." Speech is a huge and cumbersome prosthetic organ. Even if it's bigger and heavier than whatever it replaces, we can't help noticing how phony it looks and feels.
But of course prosthetics also have their own pleasures and rewards. Language, like a cheap horror film, is moving and scary not in spite of its fakeness, but precisely because of it. No wonder the novel is littered with lurid, hilarious descriptions of horror films seen on VCR or on late-night cable. Dodie (or is it Mina?) see herself as Jennifer Jason Leigh being torn apart in The Hitchhiker, and as Drew Barrymore playing the teenage slut in No Place to Hide. And yes, I admit it: this grotesque, artificial heightening is what really lures me into The Letters of Mina Harker. I'm seduced and intoxicated by the novel's viscous prose. This language never sits still on the page. It gestures, it screams, it sings; it ties itself into knots. It squirms all about like a living thing, dense and squishy and gelatinous. The novel is filled with metaphors stretched well beyond the breaking point. It crackles with epigrams, anagrams, and brilliant throwaway aperçus. And it's loaded with distorted, rewritten citations of texts both famous and obscure (including--conflict of interest warning--one from a book of mine). The Letters of Mina Harker is hot and cold, immediate and distant, passionate and ironic, all at once. In the way she calls forth the myriad pleasures of sex and texts, both high and low, Dodie Bellamy may well be America's answer to Roland Barthes. I can say of her book what she (or Mina) says of one of her lovers: "I may not have liked what he did but he made me feel alive, overburdened with random meaning." - Steven Shaviro


"The Letters of Mina Harker collects a number of epistolary texts that Bellamy has published over the last ten years in a variety of public (and private) forums, written under the pen-name Mina Harker. Mina is no simple pseudonym, however, but a performative rewriting (and rewiring) of Van Helsing's secretarial adjunct from Dracula, and as Dodie Bellamy's mouthpiece, Mina becomes a feminist vampire for the 90's. Over the course of the letters (written to person[a]s living, dead, and "invented"), Mina chronicles the events of her (and "Dodie"s) colorful life as a writer living in San Francisco, as well as the ongoing (and playful) "tension" between the "author" Mina Harker and the "character" Dodie Bellamy, whose body Mina sometimes inhabits.
As an experimental, cross-genre foray into intertextuality, Bellamy's writing itself is vampiric, resurrecting the classic horror corpus and inflecting (infecting) the corpse with the blood of her own desires. In addition to the "primary" textual site of Stoker's Dracula, Bellamy borrows, bends, and breaks a number of other diverse sources and cultural-intellectual traditions: epistolary fiction, Kathy Acker, the confessionalism of Plath, horror films, French feminist theory, sadomasochism, film theory, erotica, working-class identity, and the gay and artistic circles of 1980's San Francisco, where the AIDS epidemic haunts the novel, extending the vampiric erotics of sex, blood, and death into the contemporary.
The above is not meant to be a mere listing of influences or reference points. Bellamy does not simply raise the flags of hip tropes and "sexy theory," nor does she superficially pastiche these notions as hypothetical parlor games - her text enacts them, structurally, in a real-time melange of flesh and blood, where theory just happens to be the after-the-fact explanation for what is the case. In Bellamy's fiction, the world and the self (and all attempts at explication) are fundamentally hybrid, cyborg, "both-and," and the moments of crisis (horror, abjection, disgust) are only a result of our attempts to repress experience into tidy categories with solid boundaries. These boundaries (between bodies, between worlds, between genres) press up against and penetrate one another, enacting an unmitigated new world of "trans." It is this moment of "trans" - the slash in outdated "either/or" binarisms, the "cross" in cross-genre or cross-dressing - that becomes the site of self (and textual) (de/re)construction, that heightened moment of horror where boundaries and categories break down, enacting a kind of reconfigured utopia (literally no-place) that in Bellamy's hands becomes freeing rather than threatening.
The ultimate utopias, of course, are to be found in sex and death, the abject "loss" of self within the formless dissolution of being and intentionality. Orgasm, for Bellamy, is not merely an exalted state of some escapist bliss or sensationalist subject matter, but rather an exemplary moment of immediacy that Mina wants to capture in writing as well. "Sex, no matter how fondly recalled, comes across as generic" - i.e., descriptions of sex are genre-laden - but the orgasm (as ineffable, as l'petit monde) exceeds descriptions or categories, exceeds the literary per se: "This [orgasm] is an ideal state of discourse - unmediated, with a totally receptive audience." The second half of this quote demonstrates Bellamy's humor, a performative, self-conscious pleasure-of-the-text that is erotic as well as "embodied."
However, as the novel (not "progresses" as much as) proceeds, Mina (as construct, as persona, as corpus/corpse) begins to take on a cyborgian self-consciousness that questions the presumed jouissance of the performative and eroticized text. In a text so attentive to the physicalized politics of gender and sexuality, the realization that writing (in the form of letters, or gossip, or narrative) places yet another set of boundaries on the "feminine" self, presents Mina with the double-bind of writing her own demise, performing her own self-deconstruction: "life as a corpse to be embalmed by the writer... THE TEXT IS NOT A BODY it is a coffin." This self-reflexivity adds yet another layer to an already dense and complex narrative. For Mina Harker, as for Bellamy, writing is a matter of breathing life into a literary corpse (contemporary fiction) so that the living dead (the pulsing, erotic, written words) may startle us into self-recognition. If the novel is dead, The Letters of Mina Harker are missives from beyond the grave, as well as letters from fiction's future." - David Buuck

"The Letters of Mina Harker by Dodie Bellamy is a history of a young unlady writing in San Francisco in the 1980s. Stoker's Mina Harker, "this plain Jane secretarial adjunct," in Bellamy's hands becomes her own subject who vows never to "perish in domesticity like a Jane Austen heroine." In the wings: AIDS and death exercise their insatiable appetites. By blurring the lines between sexual and literary articulation ("my throat is a cunt"), Bellamy/Harker "suck up the silence." Gender, genre, and class crash in The Letters in a culture bomb. "I am a post-punk Milton waging a one woman war against structure, taste, logic and even words themselves."
Bellamy's "bestiare d'amour" has an affinity with Kathy Acker's no-holds-barred approach and the work of Dennis Cooper and other "new narrative" writers. Identity is always in question; boundaries always at risk. Mina and Dodie defy pinning down. They're shifting, in constant motion. Bellamy constructs a sophisticated doppleganger effect between author and subject, undermining her own position of mastery by implicating herself on the page. "Dodie's so much more constructed than I. She makes a clone of herself, Mina Harker." Mina/Dodie's voracious appetite/cunt/writing (where does one end and the other begin?) gulp down everything–cum, pop, cock, culture, films, history, literature, horror, philosophy, fast food, sex, and anything else she can get her hands and mind on–spewing it back "bursting with plots you never stop narrating." (Although this is said about Sam D'Allessandro, it also describes The Letters.) Narrow and binary definitions of form and content, theory and creative work, high and low life, authenticity ("Who cares if it's true or merely a dream spiraling into the darkness, a piece of cheap dinnerware covered with jewels"), class, and gender are uprooted and exposed in all their complexity in The Letters.(62) This mish-mash of high and low raw matter is the stuff used to create a glittering universe. "Yet all that was sick or hysterical about her behavior in day-to-day life could be turned into something valuable through the act of writing."
Historically, the epistolary novel has its origin as a form used by male writers to tell the private, supposedly "authentic" (read unmediated) story of a woman's seduction, abandonment, and fall. Claire Goldstein points out that "from the seventeenth century on, the letter becomes associated with the feminine" and is encoded feminine in several ways: "as an activity engaged in by women, as a published genre appreciated by a largely female audience, and also as a reflection of a certain cultural image of female character."(emphasis added) The letters are usually presented as written for private not public purposes. Once they have been made public–after some remarkable or fortuitous chance–they are presumed to be part of a secret and therefore more revealing, more authentic text. Frequently the female subject, as in Les Liaisons Dangereuses or Clarissa, is of a "propertied" family. That is, she is not working class. There would be no tragedy to reveal in telling the tale of a poor or working class woman's fall. She is already fallen. She is always the other woman: sexualized, disposable, already erased, not part of the cultural economy. Middle and upper class women are located as pure, clean, virginal, marriageable, and therefore part of the cultural economy though often as an object of exchange and consumption. Goldstein notes that "the style and format attributed to epistolary prose–natural, light, naive–resemble the style of conversation cultivated in aristocratic women and enforced by cultural discourse and instruction."(emphasis added)
As Kathy Lou Schultz points out, "while it is now possible to identify a trajectory of experimental women's writing, to inhabit a vocabulary of gender and sexuality, references to class often remain just that: mere codes." Bellamy's The Letters of Mina Harker challenges codes of social decorum and propriety, and their relationship to class, at every turn. In The Letters, Bellamy takes the form of the epistolary novel and wrests it from its "high" ground. She launches her culture bomb, exploding the discrete notions of anything that could be considered "natural," "authentic," "light," "naive," and makes something new and endlessly expandable, exponentially multiplying the details, descriptions, digressions sounding out–"in medias mess"–"the joyful, troublesome, gender, genre [class] exploding noise."(Retallack)
Bellamy’s challenges expose even while acknowledging that the codes of gender (and I’d add class) make anything she does twice as shocking than anything a man might do. "I like to talk dirty too," Bellamy states, "But sometimes it's such a yawn since all the cards are stacked on my side–being female, anything I do is automatically twice as shocking as anything you do...". She out-others the notion of Other, thereby overturning one of the organizing principles of the epistolary genre: "...having been an Other since the day I was born, being the other woman was small potatoes to me." Our author is seductress; married woman (to a gay man and writer, "KK"); the other woman; a woman fantasizing about her favorite "Victoria's Secret" model, Fredrique; the frump in a torn bathrobe at the keyboard, writer; woman who sits apart from another woman–"her face every inch of it covered with lipstick"–to "show they have different futures", and a host of others.
Identity is always fluid and gender open for appropriation: "I loved it when my tits or my cock or my asshole would destroy my own ego with their needs." "I'm amazed at my erection long and hard and colorful." And while the effects of class in the hands of many may be buried in codes, Bellamy takes a different tactic: "Thus did I understand that Rendezvous and I were involved in a conflict of form–he approached me from behind sneaking up on my subconscious like a tracking missile (he calls this letting things pass, I called him a passive-aggressive asshole). I'm the William Tell type, firing at a person point blank (he called me a controlling bitch, I call this getting things out in the open)...". Bellamy eradicates boundaries between what can be articulated and how in public or in private and risks the consequences of doing so, particularly at the heart of the intersection of class, gender, and innovative writing. Bellamy has remarked on the SUNY poetics listserv that "the feminist poetics scene in San Francisco nourished me–but it became quite clear fairly early on that I was not going to be supported there (quite the opposite) for the sexuality and vulgarity I was moving towards. (Though it wasn't as bad as when I recently read in Cambridge and nobody would look me in the eye or talk to me after my reading.)"
By assuming multiple positions (or what Schultz calls "complex and mediated identities"), Bellamy marks herself as someone struggling against the system of fixed social, class, literary, and gender structures/strictures. She is then invested with the power to address, unseat, lay bare, redress whatever may fall under her gaze and pen. And yet, as Bellamy says in "Reading Tour" from Tripwire 2, "While I believe–really believe–that formal innovation opens new vistas of expression, better allows me to track a psyche's collisions with a fucked-up misogynistic culture, I'm still plagued with self-doubt. Am I an elitist, I ask myself, am I like one of those social climbing neighbors my mother scorned, the ones who traipsed around with shopping bags from Marshall Field when Sears and J.C. Penney have everything a reasonable person would need?"("Reading Tour" 127-28) She still questions her particular strategies for addressing vulgarity and sexual and innovative literary pleasures/pressures (class, gender, genre). She remains poised, sometimes hilariously ("Life is like marriage: who could stand the constancy if you didn't take it for granted") at an outpost on the edge of some nether world.
In Bellamy's hands, Harker is no polite, anorexic, aristocratic debutante. Right at the outset, Bellamy's voracious appetite ("This book is the bag. So is my cunt.") is unleashed, chowing down everything from Nosferatu, Duchamp, Bram Stoker, "Hill Street Blues," William Gibson, The Hunger, Newton's machinery, herbaceous plants of the Amazon, bloody sanitary napkins used as literary and sexual fodder, literary theory, and Gregory Corso, to name just a few (and this is just in the first letter or two!).
As Joan Retallack has said in another context, but which aptly describes Bellamy's Letters, "[T]he very act of attending entails a radical figure/ground shift." Good middle class girls and women are polite, taught not to discuss (or even see) the monstrous; indeed this is part of the education for becoming a woman in middle class society. In discussing the social pressures to silence adolescent women, Michelle Fine notes, "The voices... echo powerful, diverse, and yet share messages to domesticate, submit, and be nice, if not mute." Bellamy speaks about topics which are often veiled or kept hidden by the codes of polite, middle class conversation, literature, and sexual politics, such as "my nose against his soft-hard cock, nostrils itching with fabric softener and urine."(11, emphasis added) As she states elsewhere, "The monstrous and the formless have as much right as anybody else."
Bellamy addresses these things using a vocabulary and diction that is the marriage of street and poetry, "I am so aroused my clit flicks like a tongue." She violates rules about where it is O.K. to speak as well: "...in...the Roxie Theater...I shout, 'That's me on the screen you assholes!"(9) "Bad metaphors are the only way we can approach the really important things, don't you agree?" she confides, continuing by way of example, "the stars are astonishing, the sky speckled like the black-suited shoulders of a guy with really bad dandruff." She understands the conventions of authenticity, privacy, gossip and voyeurism on which the epistolary novel rests: "DON'T TELL ANYBODY are the three most erotic words in the English language." Bellamy challenges what one can speak about (subject matter), how one can talk about it (vocabulary, diction, form, taste), where (context), and by whom (gender). This Mina is no disgraced, fallen woman. Having joyfully positioned herself in opposition to this system, she revels in the full menu of pleasures (and pain, rage, etc) to which she has access and can give voice. In The Letters, sex, life, death, characters, the body, desire, the text will not be contained by rules of class, gender, and social decorum. There is mutiny here, but no muteness.
This is writing without shame. Bellamy presents the particular details of her characters' existence, giving voice to their complexities as educated people living at a lower economic status. An example is her description of the Kentucky Fried chicken wedding meal, which is had while sitting on a sofa with "springs poking my butt" in front of a 12 inch black and white TV (this is not a description of a first married meal in middle class land!), alongside an invocation of a Duchamp nude. Others might include "KK" fixing his zipper with a staple gun or the kitschy apartment with a photo of Deneuve ripped from a magazine, strewn dirty clothes, and an ashtray from a local restaurant. "KK's" face is lovingly described as being "like his thrift store clothes: worn but to the innovative never beyond mending" while his TV dinners come from Canned Food Outlet. Or there is the description of sex in the car with Dion, whose day job is hauling around carcasses–and Dion holding up a bloody finger (She has her period and he's not cleaned up from work).
Bellamy addresses without simplifying the intricacies of class, suggesting that any elision of such distinctions would itself be a wrong: "Voice spit tears shit a cry–the refusal to emit seems like a crime." This notion of complexity is enacted formally, as the letters are addressed to multiple others: the reader; an individual who is dead (the writer, Sam D'Allessandro); fans; lovers; personal friends; and others who may be "fictional" characters (Qunicey, Dr. Van Helsing). Bellamy locates the class, gender and social pressures/conventions underlying the epistolary form and plays with those conventions. Out of this is created a form that performs a complex relation. It's both kitschy and sublime.
In The Letters, Bellamy marries high and low culture. Texts, movies, and a host of other second-hand material are used as jumping off points to create something new. And because the reader may be familiar with many of these other materials, and because of the resemblance to seemingly real people, say in the San Francisco writing scene, the boundaries between these things are constantly moving and in question. The novel is a performance in which, willingly or not, everyone participates.
The writing itself is sexualized in what could be considered a particularly female strategy. As Genre Tallique says, "Attention to the complex discontinuities of the feminine in language will explode the shortest distance between points and turn it into a field of sinuous, labyrinthine lanes." Dodie/Mina say that "the simplest narrative is the history of a gratified desire" but then go on to create a world/text in which "she cannot resist cannot withhold she reveals things too early, slips in the vulnerable the unwise the embarrassing the scandalous." Writing is sexy, sexual, generative, voracious, expansive: "Writing has always been more sexual than sex, the sustained arousal of never quite getting it right." Desire is anything but gratified, certainly not simple, or linear. Yet Bellamy understands the allure of narrative, "I am eager for his ejaculations as I was for Emma Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennett to marry," although she refuses the mousetrap of plot. The book openly struggles with how to "end" such a text: "So here I am, working on my ending, going crazy with endings...". The writing is full of desire at every turn. "Eagerly he licks his cum from my mouth: I want to bring the reader this close to writing." And she does.
Perhaps the social and reductively defined codes of middle-class life and literature, or any bounded area–feminist writing, the novel, relationships, for example–attempt to too narrowly structure the world, whatever particular world we're talking about. Bellamy gives voice to the complicated, the messy, the vulgar and explicit. Her writing is multiplicitous and interwoven, blowing up boundaries of silence and absence in whatever guise in the class, gender, genre big bang. Like Jane Austen, an author Bellamy talks about reading in The Letters, and other writers who have gone before, Bellamy provides an important role model for writers breaking with traditional strategies and codes about what can be explored in a literature interested in narrative and how to address class and gender issues in the context of innovative form." - Robin Tremblay-McGaw

Dodie Bellamy, Pink Steam (Suspect Thoughts Press, 2008)

"Dodie Bellamy sows poetic bedlam in Pink Steam, an introspective collection of bits of fictionalized memoir and reflection that explore everything from sexual desire to the temptations of shoplifting. Bellamy deconstructs Barbie's Dream House, recounts a run-in with "Venus" and reports from "the field" (read: her mother's couch in Indiana) on the 2000 Republican National Convention. Her offbeat, flirtatiously subversive prose puts a fresh spin on countercultural life in San Francisco and the Midwest from the 1970s to the present." - Publishers Weekly
Dodie Bellamy, Barf Manifesto (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008)

«Asked to write a paper on alternative forms of memoir for the 2007 Modern Language Association conference, Bellamy wrote an admiring analysis of "Everyday Barf," the essay that concludes Eileen Myles's recent poetry collection Sorry Tree. Bellamy's talk, "MLA Barf," became a rousing defense of the "barf" as a literary form. Here "MLA Barf" is joined by its sequel, "CCA Barf," delivered as a lecture at the California College of the Arts some months later. Together the two talks celebrate Eileen Myles—especially her genius for bringing the body into writing—as well as the conceptual practices of two British visual artists, Tariq Alvi and Bridget Riley. In addition, Barf Manifesto, like The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, is an intimate account of a long, sometimes tortured, but enduring friendship between two female writers.
In the words of critic Ramsey Scott, "Bellamy asks us: how can sloppiness become an intellectual stance, a methodology with its own aesthetic and political priorities? How might a permeable editorial screen that allows for error, parataxis, and the non sequitur serve as the basis for a hybrid kind of writing that is at once critical and autobiographical, factual and fictional? What does it mean to insist upon the disorderly as a means of cultural critique and political engagement?»

«Novelist Dodie Bellamy’s pamphlet Barf Manifesto—about, among other things, the author Eileen Myles—shares significant thematic DNA with [Phillip Lopate's] Notes on Sontag. Both texts are interested in the art of writing about writers and in the essay as a literary form. But even as these two books make excellent companions, they bear out significant differences, too. Though a significant force, Myles is less famous than Sontag was; she is also more humorous, more comfortable as a fiction writer, and (hooray) alive and well. Unlike Lopate, Bellamy counts her subject as a close friend, though the deeply honest and ocassionally cranky Barf Manifesto gives us a taste of how complex their relationship has been.
The biggest difference between the books lies in their tone and structure: Where Lopate polishes his meditations into self-contained reflections, Bellamy shifts, sometimes midsentence, among her themes. She opens with a paean to Myles’s poem “Everyday Barf,” gives an evocative portrait of the artist attacking a birthday piñata with a hammer, and then begins to zigzag between motifs—mothers, death, fiction, anger, creative communities. Her verbal upchuck could have become a mess, but the shifts are so exquisitely structured that they rarely fail to marvel. When one steps back from Bellamy’s narrative, her discrete thoughts somehow contrast and interact like the dots on a Seurat canvas, forming a vivid portrait of art and friendship. You’ll wonder how she did it. Barf has never looked so good.»—Michael Miller

"First of all, in case you don’t know who Dodie Bellamy is, Sonic Youth reference her.
Second of all, Sonic Youth are fans of Dodie Bellamy’s work.
OK. So I’m a huge fan of Sonic Youth and Dodie Bellamy so their friendship excites me on many levels.
A few months ago I was able to go to the book launch for “Barf Manifesto” and then I went home to visit my family a few days after. I finished reading the book on the plane then gave “Barf Manifesto” to my mom and cousin to read to see what their reactions would be since both are avid readers – neither had heard of Dodie and neither really looks at books as having any weight outside of what the Oprah Book Club says a book is worth (so basically book burning isn’t happening – which Sarah Palin is for btw – but making sure pop culture only sees that Oprah Book Club books are important is just as good as burning as far as I’m concerned because no other ideas are tolerated). After they both read the book they each looked at me a bit bewildered and said they’d need to know a lot more about the movements she is apart of to understand what she is talking about, unfortunately both will most likely remain more obsessed with putting gas in their cars than caring to think about art and contemporary ideas.
Anyway, if you aren’t well versed in feminist theory, critical theory, contemporary poetry, ect then Dodie’s “Barf Manifesto” will projectile all over you and if you are well versed then I’m sure you sat open mouthed as the reigning Queen sprayed all over you – you water sport slut – Dodie Bellamy barfs on that idea – a good old fashion chunky barf that I’m sure Sally Jessie Raphael would take the time to try and understand.
HERE IS AN EXCERPT:
“Passion in writing or art—or in a lover—can make you overlook a lot of flaws. Passion is underrated. I think we should all produce work with the urgency of outsider artists, panting and jerking off to our kinky private obsessions. Sophistication is conformist, deadening. Let’s get rid of it.”—Dodie Bellamy, from Barf Manifesto
The image on the cover of Barf Manifesto is a Raymond Pettibon image, when I asked Dodie about her cover choice she said she wanted the cover to represent a disheveled crazy women so she could, in theory, pass out her newest chap book on street corners. I pictured a Valerie Jean Solanas type character passing out their manifesto and working the street corners as I included the above image of me, naked, holding the book, I admit it, I do look fat in the image but that is because I had yet to finish reading and projectile vomit all over my signed collectors copy (OK – I didn’t barf on it but I did puke in the ocean, it’s only cause I ate a gigantic burrito before opening up the essay and my petite bod couldn’t handle the ridiculous amount of beans and cheese I dumped into it but the fish ate the puke, I’m sure and I know cause I put on a snorkel and watched)! I couldn’t write a review of Barf Manifesto without somehow including myself because I want to be an extension of her new call to literary vomit, I sat through plenty of college English courses and I’ve talked to enough pompous assholes to know this conclusion is not unwarranted. Dodie Bellamy is the professor everyone goes to college wishing for, she fights Academia and all the boundaries and hierarchies they perpetuate. Check out Academonia!
In Barf Manifesto, Dodie Bellamy challenges one of the last places in the literary world where subjectivity has yet to be considered appropriate – the academic essay. Dodie was asked to write an essay about alternative forms to memoir and she chose to discuss a work by Eileen Myles. Dodie doesn’t believe readers must sit through objective essays alone, instead she has brought her innards into the world of the essay – the food yet digested. Readers watch her struggle with Eileen Myles essay, “Everyday Barf” and with Eileen herself, as they battle over a toilet bowl with pleasure and power and barf. The end product is a conversation between two female writers about the very things writers discuss; each other, fiction, toilets, pets, egos, narrative forms, and more.
So basically, get yourself a copy of the book, head to the beach, stock up on some food and alcohol along the way, grab yourself a notebook that you plan on writing in, then get there, get naked, read the damn essay “fingers down throat, one, two, three, bleh” then send me your own manifesto as you step into the squiggly circle inhabited with all those that are a part of the barf that is “feminist, unruly, cheerfully monstrous…. The Barf is messy, irregular, but you can feel in your guts that its going somewhere, you can’t stop it, can’t shape it, you’ve just got to let it run its course.” - Minor Progression

"Dodie Bellamy's Barf Manifesto is one of the best essays I've ever read. It only takes about half an hour to read, and I'm slow. If she asked me to barf for her, I would. No questions asked. Her break in the traditional essay structure allows for something many essays don't, pleasure. The language is beautiful and entertaining without giving up analysis or content. BARF BARF BARF. She draws a line in the sand for readers. She allows in the personal. She totally barfs all over the notion of "objectivity," which, although it may seem out-dated or trite in this "post-modern" world we live in, it is still very much entrenched in academia. BARF. She contextualized the poetry of Eileen Myles (whom I've never really liked) in a way that resonated in me and led me to actually the poem "Everyday Barf." So basically, she's awesome and crazy smart.
I'm head over heals about her writing, and anyone who hasn't taken the time to read her, you definitely should." - Maurice Burford

From Barf Manifesto:
«Passion in writing or art—or in a lover—can make you overlook a lot of flaws. Passion is underrated. I think we should all produce work with the urgency of outsider artists, panting and jerking off to our kinky private obsessions. Sophistication is conformist, deadening. Let's get rid of it.»

Dodie Bellamy, Academonia (Krupskaya, 2006)

«In this lively, entertaining collection of essays, Dodie Bellamy has written not only a helpful pedagogical tool, but an epic narrative of survival against institutional deadening and the proscriptiveness that shoots the young writer like poison darts from all sides. By the 90s funding for the arts had dwindled and graduate writing programs—“cash cows”—had risen to fill the slack. Simultaneously, literary production moved from an unstable, at times frightening street culture where experiment was privileged beyond all else, to an institutionalized realm—Academonia!—that enforces, or tends to enforce, conservative aesthetic values.
Among the questions Bellamy raises: how does the writer figure out how to write? How will she claim her content among censorious voices? Can the avant-garde create forms that speak to political and spiritual crisis? Can desire exist in a world of networking structures? To the keepers of the status quo, what is so goddamned scary about experimental writing? Bellamy’s textual body morphs through sex, ravenous hunger, aging, displacement, cuddling with animals. Along the way she invokes Levi Strauss, Kurosawa, Marvin Gaye, Christiane (the faceless daughter in Georges Franju’s 1959 horror classic Eyes Without a Face), Alice Munro, Michael Moore, Quan Yin, Cinderella, and the beheaded heroine Lady Jane Grey. On Foucault’s grid of invisible assumptions, Academonia casts a blacklight vision, making it glow in giddy FX splendor.»

«There are the institutions that are created without our input and the institutions that we create with others. Both sorts of institutions define us without our consent. Dodie Bellamy’s Academonia explores the prickly intersection among these spaces as it moves through institutions such as the academy, the experimental writing communities of the Bay Area, feminist and sexual identities, and group therapy. Continuing the work that she began in The Letters of Mina Harker pushing memoir and confession out of its safety zones and into its difficulties, this book provokes as it critiques and yet at the same time manages to delight with its hope.» - Juliana Spahr

«Way back in the seventies, and before Bellamy, pastiche and bricolage as applied to literature made me yawn. Smug attacks on linear narrative through the use of tired language games aroused my contempt. As far as I was concerned, theory had ruined fiction by making critic and artist too intimate. Then Bellamy’s pioneering graftings of storytelling, theory and fractured metaphor changed all that, giving birth to a new avant-garde. Her writing sweeps from one mode of thought to another in absolute freedom, eviscerating hackneyed constructs about desire and language and stuffing them with a fascinating hodgepodge of sparkling sensory fragments. The result is true postmodernism, not the shallow dilettantism of the “postmodern palette.” She sustains it on page after page, weaving together sex and philosophy, fusing trash with high culture, injecting theory with the pathos of biography and accomplishing nothing less than a fresh and sustained lyricism. What is more, her transfiguration of the trivial details of life by the mechanisms of irony, fantasy, disjunction, nostalgia and perverse point of view prove that it’s not the life you live that matters, but how you tell it.» - Bruce Benderson
Dodie Bellamy, Cunt-Ups (Tender Buttons Books, 2001)

"Dodie Bellamy continues and extends Tender Buttons' legacy of publishing radical, cutting edge writing by women. She writes, CUNT-UPS is a hermaphroditic salute to William Burroughs and Kathy Acker… Is the cut-up a male form? I've always considered it so -- needing the violence of a pair of scissors in order to reach nonlinearity. Oddly, even though I've spent up to four hours on each cunt-up, afterwards I cannot recognize them - just like in sex, intense focus and then sensual amnesia."

"Cunt-Ups is a hermaphroditic salute to William Burroughs and Kathy Acker. I started the project as cut-ups, in the original Burroughs sense, as delineated in The Job. I used a variety of texts written by myself and others. Per Burroughs’ rather vague instructions, I cut each page of this material into four squares. For each cunt-up I chose two or three squares from my own source text, and one or two from other sources. I taped the new Frankenstein page together, typed it into my computer and then reworked the material. When my own source text was used up my cunt-ups were finished. The body with all organs slithers and lunges through netsex, psychic oozings, alien invasion, and serial murder. In ecstatic peristalsis the lover endlessly re/turns to life.
Is the cut-up a male form? I’ve always considered it so—needing the violence of a pair of scissors in order to reach nonlinearity. Is the pornographic a male realm? I think so. Women are usually stuck in the more wishy-washy "erotic." These cunt-ups are my version of Take Back the Night. I’m barging in on pornographic language and subverting it to my own ends. Cunt-Ups is also very much about sexual obsession and desire. In American English we have a language for romance and a language for pornography, but the two rarely meet. In Cunt-Ups, which I see as a very romantic text, I’m collapsing romance and porn. Sex can’t be reduced to events that happen to a person. Sex is a trap, a labyrinth, a matrix that engulfs you. Oddly, even though I’ve spent up to four hours on each cunt-up, afterwards I cannot recognize them—just like in sex, intense focus and then sensual amnesia. They enter the free zone of writing; they have cut their own ties to the writer. She no longer remembers these disembodied shreds of desire as her text. (Dodie Bellamy)"

"Dodie Bellamy in Cunt-Ups uses overtly sexual texts, her own and ones written by others. She arranged her pages whole cloth, cut 'em into quarters and re-arranged them like tiles. She smoothed the resulting page out till it seemed right. The "cunt-ups" of the title refer to William Burroughs's famed cut-up technique. I think there's a deliberate air of domesticity (like working-class moms making dresses from patterns) to how she describes her project--this female riffing on the historic practice of the quintessential "outsider" man. Especially when I think of Burroughs's prophetic railing against the corporate monstrosity, while taking into account the irony of his being the scion of a huge corporate family; and when I recall how much Burroughs hated women, calling them (us) "two-holed monsters," and how he shot his wife (allegedly a lifelong sorrow for Burroughs, yet still how much worse for her!). There's something horribly fitting that Dodie Bellamy, who incidentally comes from a Midwestern, no-privilege background, would construct a small book of endless romps like:
I contact either myself or you, I recall being involved at this time when I moved our hand across my body and I felt like I had one of those small water pistols. You were dripping instead of shooting your victims, you were living in your stomach penis and balls. I fuck you in a garage, I fuck you as if you'll be recovered like a sledgehammer in a garage, like you'll eat my brains. I get all stirred up, I was still half asleep and started flopping about, I was shown to have my right hand cupped around the sledgehammer's base, I used to break up the bones to reach your balls, kneeling before you, here, a sledgehammer will be placed on inventory, your cunt is comfortable, that and your tits, orgasm, after orgasm, but I can't shake wanting to plant myself inside you, gray handle, my hips spreading across the chair, feeling me over. I just want to suck on your nipples.
In a way Burroughs could say anything--he couldn't be thrown out of anything, could he?--being a man, being on a small trust fund, living at the end of the world. Already killed his wife. What's to lose? I think about how Bellamy's appropriation of his method is not unlike Kathy Acker's, but Kathy was also a trust-fund kid, and was personally safer being bad--because the upper classes are entitled to transgress for us all. I applaud this dedicated act of replacement, the joyfully willful construction of a Frankenstein text, one where the genitals are all confused in a timeless flow--all present, as a particularly ballsy female accomplishment. Going one further than Bill, the avant-garde's Dubelyew, in taking this sublime stab at pleasure, the rearrangement of hundreds of cunts and clits and dicks and pussies: The exhausted "I just want to suck on your nipples" has tremendous immanence, all gesture, a mad kind of one-time power." - Eileen Myles

"Three Love-Visions (after reading Dodie Bellamy’s “Cunt-Ups” and kind of inspired also by Johannes Goransson’s more lively posts)
I’m putting you in a barrel. I am fucking you. I’m placing your head in a bag. I am fucking you. I’m smearing your blood all over your tits. I am fucking you. I’m slicing your cunt up like a smile, and I’m fucking your mouth. Your sliced-open bleeding mouth. Baby, don’t you just love these new storage bags? At the bottom of a lake. I’m kissing your tits. Kissing them to death. On a jetty. O, my baby. Only you.

My sweat’s dripping on to you as I fuck you. I am kissing you. I am slicing off your nipples. On the beach the sand in my hands is definitely not so white as I’d like it to be. The water not so green——the Cancun sort of green I adore. I’m rubbing my head against your jaw. I’m carrying you over my shoulder. You’re gurgling. And now you’re not. There’s so much blood. There’s hardly any at all. I’m posing you in a crucifix and I am kissing you and kissing you.

I’m in love with you.
And here’s my fantasy:
I’m fucking you from behind
And I’m taking your head in my hands
And I’m kissing your ears
Breathing into your neck
And snapping it..." - Rauan Klassnik

From Cunt-ups:
http://www.stretcher.org/features/images/2002/bellamy/cuntups_db.php