Five Favorites from 2013

There have been so, so many wonderful books I've had the chance to read over the course of the last year. In fact, not only have I gotten to read novels but poems, plays, history and critique, too. It was hard to select my five favorites, and I tried to have my list represent various of these genres as well as a range in historical and geographic contexts. It was difficult to chose only five, but I liked the alliteration of "Five Favorite" too much to turn back, so here we have it...

5. El libro de buen amor by Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita

This gem comes from the clever quill of a medieval priest of the Iberian peninsula. Juan Ruiz, the priest of Hita, was known as a cheeky but good-natured rogue, writing theological teachings in what would appear to be a guide to sensual delights.

You may remember I mentioned him a while ago, quoting a particularly brassy passage that taught readers not to be given the the sin of sloth because their sex lives would surly suffer.

"The Book of Good Love," as it is translated into English, is a romp through anthropomorphic tales of hapless lions, allegorical battles between Lady Lent and Master Meat, and a small peek into the life of "Trotaconventos" ("convent trotter"), a go-between nun. All of this is masterfully woven into rhyme, with heavenly lessons seemingly taught through earthly adventures. I loved this book and inadvertently dreamed in rhyme for at least a week after I finished reading it.

4. Fuenteovejuna by Lope de Vega 

Image source

Based on an historical event from medieval Spain, this play takes the name of a town, Fuenteovejuna, that allegedly banded together to overthrow--by pain of death--the malicious lord of their region.

Written around one hundred years after the event, this play was penned by the most prolific writer of the Spanish Baroque, Lope de Vega. In this play, Lope imagines the desperation and grief of the townspeople and their rally to rebellion.

On the wedding day of the central characters, Laurencia and Frondoso, the evildoing Comendador rides through the party and snatched up the two newlyweds, placing Frondoso in the dungeon of his castle and abusing Laurencia. When she makes her escape, she runs back to the town and, with blood on her face and her clothes torn, she shames all the gathered men of the town for cowering in fear rather than coming to her rescue.

As I read that monologue, tears streamed down my face. The the depth of her sense of betrayal, the intensity of her wrath and desire for revenge blaze like a hateful fire in the mouth of a once-delicate young woman. The town becomes changed into a bloodthirsty hoard that marches to the Comendador's castle, cuts him down, and celebrates with his head on a pike. Afterwards, Inquisitors are sent to the town with torture devices to try and discover who murdered the region's lord. But when asked who was responsible, even under the duress of torture, men, women and children of the town answer only: "¡Fuenteovejuna!"

Someday I would love to see this play in person. I have read some critiques of the play that claim Lope de Vega wrote it to show how terrifying the ignorant masses would be, if ever they learned of their power, and that power should always remain in the hands of discerning monarchs. But I'm not convinced of that cynical take on Lope's intension with the play. Rather, I think he chose to gaze unwaveringly at the terrifying capacity of the human spirit to be moved by its own righteousness.

Here is a clip showing Laurencia's famous speech-- it is in Spanish and there are no subtitles, but it will nonetheless convey to the fiery intensity I described even if you don't understand the words:




3. Auto da compadecida by Ariano Suassuna 

I loved this play so much that I dedicated an entire post to it, right after I finished reading it. A Brazilian comedy set in the northeastern backlands, the play pits the violent severity of a bandit against the wits of a poor trickster and a a cast of hapless characters caught in the middle--including the lusty unfaithful wife and her witless husband, a greedy sacristan, and an old dog wed to a money-shitting cat.

The humor of this play seems to be of the very same ilk I appreciated so much in the medieval text of the Arcipreste de Hita. Suassuna brilliantly weaves together the timelessly hilarious with the unmistakably Brazilian. This is another one I'd like to see performed live-- in addition to some of his other plays, namely A mulher vestida de sol (a Romeo and Juliet-like tragedy, whose title translates as The Woman Dressed in the Sun).  


2. Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis

I read this book for a seminar this past semester and was delighted to have the chance to revisit the storytelling prowess of 19th century Brazilian author: Machado de Assis.

About a year ago, I had my first encounter with him, reading As memórias pósthumas de Brás Cubas (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas), narrated by a "deceased-author" from beyond the grave. In it, the narrator turns an ironic gaze on the attendees at his funeral and on the memory of those who survived him as he recalls the events of his life.

In Dom Casmurro, the narrator is a cantankerous older man, barley able to hide his general displeasure and unease with the memories he recounts of the people and events that made up his youth and middle age. The narrator's sense of humor is so biting and his critical eye so piercing that the reader finds himself laughing while at the same time shaking his head, in one of those almost melancholic "funny-cuz-its-true" moments.

Machado de Assis' gift to literature was not only his sense of ironic humor; his innovative narrative style tested (and extended) the boundaries literary realism. The narrator of Dom Casmurro often speaks directly to the reader, integrating imagined readers into the narrative. At the time of its publication, the reading public in Brazil was relatively small, so the author simply invented his readers and placed them directly in dialogue with his narrator and characters. The imagine male readers received the literary equivalent of a "wink wink nudge nudge" and female readers, imagined as "proper" and full of false-piety, received equally false apologies that would end with an invitation to put down the book and not go on reading it if they were so easily offended (hmph!). The real reader ends up laughing at the characters, their narrator, and even these implied readers, who may truly have existed, in some form or another...

Unlike his contemporary in Portugal, Eça de Queirós, Machado's droll teasing of his characters ultimately had the aim of laughing with them, rather than at them. He loved his deeply flawed, pompous, silly, arrogant, racist and sexist characters--because if he didn't, who would there be left in the world for him to love? Though realism set out to reveal the naked truth about humans' deplorable qualities, Machado seemed to have decided that, even after careful inspection of these qualities, there still may be something worth adoring in people-- even those that die alone and absorbed in memories and old jealousies. While Eça de Queirós in Portugal and "Clarín" Leopoldo Alas in Spain wrote huge (and yes, enjoyable) novels filled with ridiculing irony that constantly laughed at the characters, especially when they were down, Machado de Assis embraces human imperfections, has a good laugh at them, and goes on loving them.

1. LITERATURA DE CORDEL!!!

YOU GUYS. I recently received a long-awaited package in the mail, all the way from Brazil. It was a box FULL of cordel chapbooks. I have begun reading them, and promise to devote future posts to them, as is only proper.

Putting an entire genre of poetry as my number-one-favorite is a total copout, and I know it. And yes, technically this should be in my list of things I'm looking forward to finishing reading in the coming year. But I had to cheat a little bit on this list because the pressure of naming a number one favorite of the year haunted me for days and kept me from writing the dang post at all.

I just couldn't bring myself to select only one book for the top slot in a year in which I also read, for my first time, El Mio Cid, La vida es sueño, Los pasos perdidos, Rios profundos, La ciudad y los perros, Primo Basílio, The Hobbit, and others (links are to the English translations). It was a big year of big books. So my number one slot goes fittingly to a big array of big (little) books...



*Extra Credit: The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkein

Painting for the novel by Alan Lee

And because this is my blog, I can break my own rules and cheat some more and offer an "extra credit" title in my list. This isn't technically part of my "Five Favorites" for this year, but I wanted to include it because it is part of a broader new trend in the things I'm choosing to read for pleasure.

As a child, my mother read to me--and invented for me--a huge variety of folktales about faerie creatures that I believed to be real (or perhaps still do?). I grew up listening for songs in the woods and always watching out for a villain that plagued my nightmares for years, Red Cap.

Red Cap painting by Alan
Lee from his book, Faeries

Although I study literature as a grad student now, there are few if any folkloric tales assigned as required reading. That is not because they don't exist in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries; I think it may simply owe to the way Academy tends to define "Literature" as a category separate and distant from "Lore."

Recently, I have felt a strong desire to go back to reading these tales in my spare time (and hopefully weaving some into my dissertation!). Specifically, I have a renewed interest in the writing of J.R.R. Tolkien (admittedly rekindled by Peter Jackson's translations of the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit into the medium of film). I recently read The Hobbit for my first time ever in life (how has it taken me so long to read that book?!).

After a flurry of amazon-one-click-shopping, a box of Tolkien books showed up at our apartment door around Christmas time... one of the books I ordered was The Children of Húrin which I began reading yesterday and finished this morning. It was a fierce, serious book, with an entirely different tone from The Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings trilogy. There is none of Tolkein's humor here, nor does the power of good and truth overcome all evil. Rather, in this epic tale told in archaic-sounding language, a hero is born under a curse and in an utterly besieged Middle-earth; he must do whatever he can to survive, including join a band of outlaws and confront a dragon single-handedly.

There are so many old-sounding names--of people and creatures and places and swords--and each begs to be rolled around in the mouth and uttered aloud. The vastness of Tolkien's imagination is at once welcoming and overwhelming. I am inspired to read more of his canon, and most of all, to return to some of the tales that I remember from years and years ago...

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What are your favorite books from this past year? What are some of your favorite books of all time?

Until next time-- keep rustling!

The Dying Dog Leaves a Will and The Cat Shits Money

Ariano Suassuna

You guys. I think I'm in love. 

This is Ariano Suassuna, a living playwright from João Pessoa, Paraíba in Brazil. So far, I've only read one little thing he's written, but I'm pretty sure this is the beginning of a longterm love-affair with his writing. 

Yesterday I read his 1955 play, Auto da Compadecida (you can find an English translation by Dillwyn Ratcliff under the title The Rogue's Trial). With an intelligent and biting wit, this play riffs on fantastical literatura de cordel stories, Molière-esque humor, baroque auto sacramentales, the vernacular Catholicism of Brazil's northeast, and of course, hilarious scatological jokes (see: the title of this post). 

The plot is driven primarily by the actions of a poverty-stricken trickster named João Grilo (which means John Cricket). As he tries to improve his lot in life with the help of his only friend, Chicó, he deliberately creates confusion and chaos in order to extract money from the wealthier residents of his small northeastern town. He does this by successfully predicting the sinful ways of the other characters-- the lustfulness and greed of the baker's wife, the sloth of the baker, the greed of the sacristan, the pride of the parish priest and the bishop, and the murderous violence of the superstitious bandit, Severino. 

Cordel-inspired image of the play

The play opens with a scene in which João and Chicó are trying to figure out a way to convince the parish priest to bless the baker's wife's dog, who is near death. Through a series of amusing lies, João actually succeeds in getting the priest to bless the baker's wife's dog (and even get it buried in sacred ground with a Mass recited for it in Latin). João also creates a Last Will and Testament for the dog, setting himself up as one of the recipients of its financial bequest ("what a remarkable animal! such noble intentions!"). As the lusty baker's wife grieves her dead dog, João succeeds in selling her a cat who, he claims, shits money (the cat does a little demonstration of this special talent, shitting out a couple of coins that João and Chicó have shoved up the poor feline's ass). 

This first act establishes the picaresque lengths João is willing to go to in order to get a little money and get back at his former employers, the baker and his wife. It also demonstrates that João is the only character smart enough to create confusion and to straighten confusion out. This contrasts with his friend Chicó, who although he is constantly telling tall tales of fantastical adventures he claims to have had (in the style of fantastical literature de cordel), he is never clever enough to remember all the twists and turns in his story. When João points out an inconsistency in the story, Chicó always ends up concluding: "Não sei! Só sei que foi assim." ("I don't know! I just know that's how it was.") 

Another cordel-inspired image of the play

There are two major turning points in the play. The first major one comes when Severino, the bandit, and his righthand henchman, summarily execute all of the characters except João and Chicó, thanks to João's clever trickery. The lie João tells Severino succeeds in getting himself and Chicó spared, but only for a moment until the lie is discovered and João, Severino, and Severino's henchman all end up dead. 

The second major turning point immediately follows their deaths. All the murdered characters find themselves at their last judgement: Satan on one side sporting the leather outfit of the backlander bandit; and Jesus on the other side, an affable black man with a great sense of humor. As Satan levies charges against each one of the characters, they tremble and try to prepare themselves for an eternity in hell. But João, after having bungled everything up, is the only one able to un-bungle their mortal predicament. To do this, he calls on the Virgin Mary to intercede and act as their "defense lawyer." Mary's mercy knows no limit, and she gently defends the group of sorry souls against Satan's accusations. 

Still from the 2000 film adaptation of the play

This final act in which God the Judge decides the fate of all the play's characters reminded me a bit of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's 17th century allegorical auto sacramental called El gran teatro del mundo. The key difference between Calderón's drama and Suassuna's is the presence of humor in the latter. The audience laughs as the souls squirm during their judgement because João's irrepressible sense of humor continues even after death. And God Himself partakes in jokes-- it is only Satan who wishes to be serious, which makes him even more loathsome, monotonous, predictable.  

Furthermore, the intercession of Mary allows for "wiggle room" and negotiation in the souls' final judgement, which in turn allows for Jesus and Mary to outwit Satan and steal back the wayward souls he desperately tries to make his. Mary takes advantage of her position as defender to out-trick-the-trickster while she simultaneously rescues him from Satan's grasp, teaching João a lesson for having created so much chaos. 

But she does this with great sympathy; the mother of God not only has mercy, but also fun. Here we can begin to perceive a parallel between the divine elements of the play and the profane ones: Sinfulness--among mortals and in Satan himself--is predicable and boring. Humor and wit--among João, Chicó and Mary and Jesus--are surprising and edifying. A smart jokester (in this case João, not Chicó, who is a little dimwitted) is humble and adaptable to any situation, responding to his surroundings with a pun or a quip, thus saving himself in both worldly and heavenly realms. The pompous attitude of the self-important men-of-position are not able to interpret their circumstances quickly enough to respond effectively--they are too caught up in their own self-image, thus leading to a troublesome and dull life and afterlife. 

All of these elements of Suassuna's play come from popular tales of the northeastern oral tradition. "The obsequies of the Dog" and "The Cash-Evacuating Horse" are both anonymous popular folk ballads from the region, while the intercession of Mary is based on a popular folk play called O castigo da soberba. The result of this amalgamation of folk tales, humor, and wisdom is a play that calls attention to the human condition, its hypocrisy and its ability to redeem itself through humor. Dillwyn Ratcliff has said that Suassuna's satire "is forthright and emphatic but not bitter ..." In precious few pages, Suassuna has united a vast array of popular opinion and wit, much in the manner of the old playwrights of the commedia dell'arte. 

How do I know this...? "I don't know! I just know that's how it was..." 

Chicó, in a still from the 2000 film adaptation, reciting his characteristic line: "I don't know! I just know that's how it was." 

I highly recommend you get your hands on this play. You can expect some more reviews here on the blog of Suassuna's work in the near future, too! If you are interested in checking out the film adaptation of this play, the entire thing is available on youtube here, however there are no English subtitles on this version (you may have to purchase it to get subtitles). 

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Have you read any plays recently?? Who are your favorite tricksters?? How important do you think humor is (in matters both sacred and profane)??

Until next time, fair petticoat rustlers! Keep rustling!!