{"id":299326,"date":"2014-09-10T20:30:00","date_gmt":"2014-09-10T20:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2014\/09\/10\/rafael-chirbess-crematorium-a-month-of-a-thousand-forests\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:12:33","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:12:33","slug":"rafael-chirbess-crematorium-a-month-of-a-thousand-forests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2014\/09\/10\/rafael-chirbess-crematorium-a-month-of-a-thousand-forests\/","title":{"rendered":"Rafael Chirbes's "Crematorium" [A Month of a Thousand Forests]"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m going to have to double up on these for a while in order to catch up and make sure we cover everyone before the end of September, so expect a lot of “Forests” over the next week or so.<\/em><\/p>\n

Rafael Chirbes is up first today. I’ve been interested in his works for a while, and just today gave his newest book<\/em> En la orilla to a student to do a reader’s report for me. In looking back through my email though to see if I had a PDF<\/span> of<\/em> Crematorio anywhere, I found an email about the “Big ABC<\/span> Survey” of the best Spanish novels of the twenty-first century, which might really interest all of you. Here’s the bulk of the email:<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

The \u201cBig ABC<\/span> survey\u201d that was carried out among a hundred writers, editors, literary agents and cultural figures has chosen<\/em> The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa as the best Spanish language novel of the twenty first century.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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In second place appears<\/em> Crematorium by Rafael Chirbes. In ABC\u2019s words, \u201cIn a true t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate with the winner, the work of Rafael Chirbes stands out enormously. Using a realist point of view it has understood how to depict the profound (economic, moral, almost total) crisis of Spanish society in a painful and accurate way\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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In third place appears<\/em> Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Mar\u00edas followed by<\/em> Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas,<\/em> The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zaf\u00f3n,<\/em> The Infatuations by Javier Mar\u00edas,<\/em> The Cold Skin by Albert S\u00e1nchez Pi\u00f1ol,<\/em> Montano by Enrique Vila-Matas,<\/em> Lizard Tails by Juan Mars\u00e9 and<\/em> The Day Tomorrow by Ignacio Mart\u00ednez de Pis\u00f3n.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Of the nine authors listed there (Mar\u00edas appearing twice), five of them are included in<\/em> A Thousand Forests in One Acorn.<\/a> In fact, this collection contains excerpts from both of the top two books:<\/em> Feast of the Goat and<\/em> Crematorium.<\/p>\n

More reasons that you should get a copy of<\/em> A Thousand Forests in One Acorn.<\/a> And through the end of the month, if you use FORESTS<\/span> when you check out, you’ll get it for $15.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

Rafael Chirbes (Spain, 1949)<\/b><\/center> <\/p>\n

There are a lot of deceased authors I love crowding my bookshelves at home. I talk to them; I listen to them. From Aub and Gald\u00f3s, to Tolstoy, Montaigne, Yourcenar, Lucretius and Virgil, Faulkner, D\u00f6blin, Proust, Balzac, E\u00e7a de Queiroz, and on and on. I don\u2019t leave the house much, so I reread them either at random or impelled by some intuition that tells me that this one and no other is the dead author I should hear at a particular time. For the most part, I\u2019m not mistaken. I also dream about the dead people I knew when they were alive; I\u2019ve touched them, even, and now they\u2019re nowhere, and knowing that they\u2019re not here and that I can\u2019t talk to them or hear their voices distresses me when I go to bed. Some nights they take control of the room: their absence leaves me breathless and I have to turn on the light so I don\u2019t suffocate. With the light on, it\u2019s easier to send them back to the peaceful nothingness they\u2019re struggling to escape from.<\/p>\n

You said once that literature is like a lover. Either you go all the way or they leave you. You have to know the value of hitting bottom.<\/em><\/p>\n

I think texts betray any sort of imposture on the part of their authors; they\u2019re an extremely sensitive detector. They contain what the author wants to say, but also\u2014and almost more importantly\u2014what\u2019s up his sleeve. And yes, I have the impression that writing saves me\u2014I know, I know it\u2019s sort of a romantic idea\u2014don\u2019t ask me from what, even if it\u2019s from myself, it helps me stay afloat. It puts my doubts, my anxieties, at a certain distance and, more importantly, in the service of something.<\/p>\n

Do you think there\u2019s an ethical place for literature or is it merely an aesthetic exercise?<\/em><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t believe in an aesthetic without ethics, there\u2019s no such thing: all aesthetics suggest a particular outlook on the world, and no outlook is innocent.<\/p>\n

*<\/center><\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

From Crematorio<\/em><\/center>
\n
(Crematorium)<\/center>
\n
[A Novel]<\/center><\/p>\n

You have to go up, even if it\u2019s no more than a few feet, a few yards; after all the sky starts a few feet above your head, but you must experience height, look at things from above, even if it\u2019s only a few yards, and then you will be able to chart a course; but the high and mighty Gothic tower refused to help me take that flight. Hermetic, closed, completely sealed off. Deaf, mute, blind stone. Unfeeling stone hewn from God knows what quarry. Showing off the fact that, in its dense structure, there wasn\u2019t a single weakness, not a single hole to let the water of feeling seep through. Unmentionable was the god who said let there be, fiat, and there was light, who said, open, and the earth broke in two, and a hole opened up to be filled with the blue waters of the swimming pools, the multi-story abyss rose straight up and the air-conditioning units started humming on its walls; everything in the cells of the rising honeycomb switched on, the ovens in the kitchens, and the ceramic stovetops, and every cell was filled with life, those cavities were filled with the shouts of children running down the stairs of their houses with inner tubes and plastic flippers and scuba goggles: the joy of a seaside vacation. All the blue of the Mediterranean, all the calm of the Mediterranean. My God, what would the bus drivers in the big European cities do if there were no Mediterranean, the clerks, the secretaries, the welders, the butchers, what would all those poor people do if on the horizon of their sad working lives there were no Mediterranean. And what about the millionaires who like to float around on rafts, and swim without getting their clothes wet. At this point I know all of this so well it bores me. Now everything can turn stupidly transparent (despite what Guill\u00e9n thinks). Through the aquarium glass the children watch how whales mate and how sharks sharpen their teeth before going for their morning swim, the world squeezed into a fish tank where everything is visible, like in the houses on those TV shows, Big Brother<\/em>, The Island<\/em> of who knows what, you can see everything, the enormous fish tank of the world, the sharks swimming over the heads of the aquarium visitors, showing their teeth to the kids who aren\u2019t afraid of anything anymore. There\u2019s something childish about that zeal for transparency, as if societies, like homes\u2014public life is, after all, a simulacrum of private life\u2014didn\u2019t need to have their dark zones, the places where potential energy accumulates. We, ourselves, our own bodies, have glass walls. All it takes is the push of a button to show our insides functioning on a screen.<\/p>\n

(Translated by Emily Davis)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m going to have to double up on these for a while in order to catch up and make sure we cover everyone before the end of September, so expect a lot of “Forests” over the next week or so. Rafael Chirbes is up first today. I’ve been interested in his works for a while, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[57266,57806,36566,57666,11716],"class_list":["post-299326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-a-thousand-forests-in-one-acorn","tag-crematorium","tag-emily-davis","tag-month-of-a-thousand-forests","tag-rafael-chirbes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299326"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":337226,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299326\/revisions\/337226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}