Andrés Neuman

To be quite honest, ‘Traveller of the Century’ is too long. Whilst I could appreciate the lyrical prose and lovely imagery, at times all I could think was, “Are you ever going to stop arguing about poetry?” As a great deal of the book takes place in a literary salon, such debates are frequent and lengthy. Moreover, there are no speech marks, nor any line breaks for a new interlocutor. So the reader must concentrate to identify who is speaking at any given time. I don’t especially object to the lack of speech marks, which other authors carry off well. (Notably [a:José Saramago|1285555|José Saramago|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1465235805p2/1285555.jpg] who, probably not coincidentally, has the same translator as Neuman here.) The dense paragraphs in which three or more people’s dialogue runs together were harder to digest. Whilst removal of speech marks can create a greater sense of immersion, absent line breaks seem to do the opposite. In actual conversation, comments from different speakers may sometimes overlap, but the change in voice allows them to be distinguished. More of a conscious effort is required when the reader is presented with a dense paragraph of speech, taking you out of the flow state in which I like to experience books.

In short, I am a little disappointed in what seemed like such a promising novel. It concerns a man called Hans who turns up in the city of Wandernburg, which appears to occupy an ambiguous political and geographical position. He makes friends with an organ grinder and a Spanish man of business and starts a flirtation with an intellectually stifled woman. This flirtation would at times seem interminable, if Sophie were not such an interesting and vibrant character. I was so pleased that she wasn’t reduced to an object of desire, but had her own thoughts and motivations. The relationships that Hans forms, romantic and otherwise, are in fact the most powerful and appealing element of the book. Their evolution is sometimes masked (or perhaps allegorised and it went over my head?) by all the poetic and philosophical debate. I enjoyed the thoughtful discussion of translation and its links with love, but groaned when once again Kant’s views on nationhood were brought up. I also objected to the sub-plot about the serial rapist, which was extremely creepy and seemed gratuitous. Perhaps it was meant to signify something important about Society; I did not think it justified itself.

All this whining serves to show I had high hopes for the novel and they were not met. Neuman is evidently a gifted writer, though, and I’ll keep an eye open for more of his work. I did keep reading for 578 pages despite my reservations, for the sake of paragraphs like this:

Hans hated dance halls, but at the same time they fascinated him, precisely because he never went to them. The crowd was a floating perfume, a shifting blot. In the light from the gas lamps, the ladies’ arms and shoulders seemed separate from their dresses. The rows of dancers twirled and untwirled like threads round a bobbin. Dresses and jackets touched, brushed against one another, merged. Heads glided, hats passed one another like birds, fans fluttered of their own accord.

There is also a certain perverse satisfaction in reading a novel that dwells on the act of translation at such length in its English translation.… (more)

I bought this because of the title and because I was in a lovely bookstore in Toronto and trusted their curation. I visited San Carlos de Bariloche once upon a time, at the northern edge of Patagonia. It has the feel of a ski resort town, with fancy log cabin structures and chilly mountain air. This book is about Demetrio, a young man who works as a trash collector in Buenos Aires, and does jigsaw puzzles at home in the evenings while drifting into his potent memories of Bariloche. The book is well written and translated, I wish I had the Spanish version as well to compare. There is much poetic language and imagery, there is mystery, there is reflection, there is kind of a plot. It's solid writing and unique, I'm glad I read it, but the whole doesn't cohere or stick in a satisfying way.… (more)

"Una vez Argentina" is many books in one, but above all two books: a window to the life of Andrés Neuman and his family throughout the 20th century; and at the same time a small crack through which to contemplate the convoluted recent history of Argentina. Both the familiar and the national histories intertwine --as it's probably the case with all families and nations, regardless of the place-- in a way that leaves little doubt of one thing: We, Latin Americans born under dictatorships, have an inescapable trauma. Even if we have been lucky enough not to be secondary victims, we cannot escape the everyday realization that what we regarded as normality in our innocence was nothing but an imposed conformity to the order of things.… (more)

This was Neuman's reaction to the 2011 Fukushima disaster, as experienced by Mr Yoshie Watanabe, a double-hibakusha who survived the Hiroshima bomb as a child but lost all his family to the Nagasaki one. Watanabe, retired and living in Tokyo after a long business career spent mostly overseas, is an oddly elusive character and Neuman doesn't claim to get inside his head: we see him mostly through the eyes of his four ex-girlfriends (in Paris, New York, Buenos Aires and Madrid) and through the Argentinian journalist Jorge Pinedo who is collating information from the ladies and is hoping to interview Watanabe but never quite catches up with him.

Watanabe seems to be a kind of serial exile, someone who has been made to feel by his hibakusha status that he doesn't quite belong in the realm of the living any more, and who also feels a serious disconnect with the Japanese culture that he has grown up in, but is never quite at home anywhere else either. Neuman has a lot of quiet fun with the successive layers of cultural and linguistic confusion observed by the women and with the things they tell us about postwar Japan as well as about fifties France, sixties/seventies New York, eighties Argentina and nineties Spain, and about the notions we have of rootedness and exile. When Watanabe travels to the Fukushima region in the closing section of the book and spends time talking to the — mostly elderly — residents who have stayed in the danger area around the nuclear plant despite the advice to evacuate, he seems to find an emotional connection that gives him a kind of closure.

A very interesting and ambitious book. I'm not sure if Neuman has quite got away with it in the way he did in El viajero del siglo — it's hard for the reader to deal with an opaque character like Watanabe, especially when the four women are all modelled in such detail, and it's disorienting in a novel to have a string of serious relationships that just stop without any kind of emotional repercussions. But it's certainly worth plunging into to decide for yourself.… (more)