Vheissu

“Every scene, every dialogue should advance the narrative and then if possible there should be a surprise ending.” ( about the most important aspect of the craft of fiction ) “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.” ( one of Vonnegut’s rules for fictional composition ) “The obvious alternative [to writing to please a small group of supporters] is, of course, something to please the  Atlantic ,  Harpers , or the  New Yorker . To do this would be to turn out something after the fashion of somebody-or-other, and I might be able to do it. I say might. It amounts to signing on with any of a dozen schools born ten, twenty, thirty years ago. The kicks are based largely on having passed off a creditable counterfeit. And, of course, if you appear in the  Atlantic  or  Harpers  or the  New Yorker , by God you must be a writer, because everybody says so. This is poor co...

Plot is one of those things readers of fiction are very familiar with. It’s probably what got us to read fiction in the first place. Besides, everyone with a sense of sequence will have a sense of plot, so it’s not just something habitual readers of fiction will feel close to home. Here’s a fairly simple definition: according to the Norton Introduction to Fiction , the plot is “the arrangement of the action” (p. 71). There’s a nice take on this subject in chapter 6 of Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction . He says that the “theory of narrative postulates the existence of a level of structure—what we generally call ‘plot’—independent of any particular language or representational medium. Unlike poetry, which gets lost in translation, plot can be preserved in translation from one language or one medium into another: a silent film or a comic strip can have the same plot as a short story” (p. 84). A plot is never wholly in the story. It is an abstraction, a sum...

Last week I got a copy of the Summer 2009 edition of Zoetrope: All-Story . Sure, I had read stories from Zoetrope before ( here ’s one I commented on a couple of weeks ago), but I had never held the print edition in my hands. It has a striking cover, and the pages are filled with photography. This abundance of images makes the slender volume quite tiny: there are six short stories in all, one of them two pages long. (About the artwork, well, it’s contemporary; some of the blobs of paint dripping on pages 27-28 were interesting. The guest designer was Antony, from Antony and the Johnsons . ) After I read the first story, I thought I’d be disappointed by this edition. Boy was I wrong. The following four stories were all superb. The first story was “At the Airport,” by Ryu Murakami. A woman is waiting at the airport for a customer who’s grown into her lover and with whom she is now planning to elope. She is divorced, one of the details about her life that we learn as she fills ...

Tim Keppel, Alerta de terremoto . Trad. Julio César Mejía Yépez. Bogotá: Alfaguara (2006), 307 pp. Óscar Saavedra, El Viaje . Cali: Universidad del Valle (2003), 86 pp. Tomás González, El rey del Honka-Monka (1993). Bogotá: Norma (2006), 207 pp. Javier A. Moreno, Lo definitivo y lo temporal (Inventario de objetos perdidos) . Medellín: Fondo Editorial Universidad EAFIT (2008), 103 pp. Mucho se ha dicho últimamente sobre el estado actual del cuento, y más aún del libro de cuentos. Un autor de una antología de cuentos le dedicó dos columnas al tema hace poco, en El Espectador . La revista Cambio publicó un artículo al respecto en una edición reciente. Un blog literario colombiano, El ojo en la paja , aprovechó dos libros de cuentos para pronunciarse brevemente sobre este formato. Todos coinciden en referirse a la idea de que el libro de cuentos está agonizando, y muchos buscan conjurar ese mito. El cuento no está muerto, ni moribundo. Aun si lo estuviera, sinceramente no sería algo t...

J. M. G. Le Clézio, Viaje a Rodrigues (1986). Trad. Manuel Serrat Crespo. Bogotá: Editorial Norma (2008), 125 pp. La portada es llamativa, tanto así que constantemente vuelvo a la fotografía mientras leo, como también a la biografía del autor y a la contraportada. Lo hago mucho, y no quiero admitir que es por distracción, pero así es. Cuento las páginas para el final de la sección: y para el final del capítulo, y del libro. Son sólo 125 páginas en todo el libro, pero estos malos hábitos me hacen tardarme cantidades pasando de una portada a la otra. Si bien Gravity’s Rainbow lo abandoné con desdén y lo retomé por deber , Viaje a Rodrigues lo abandonaba intermitentemente, con desidia. En realidad, no me sedujo este libro del nuevo Nobel de Literatura. Seguí mi propio consejo , y lo leí hasta el final, pero nunca llegó a convencerme. La trama es muy sencilla, y se hace clara desde los primeros capítulos: el narrador está recorriendo los pasos de su abuelo, quien llegó a la isla de Rodrigu...

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). New York: Dial Press (2005), 275 pp. Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake . New York: Berkley Books (1997), 250 pp. I already said what my greatest reading decision of 2008 was: mustering enough patience to pick up and plow through Gravity’s Rainbow when I had already given up on it. Well, my second greatest reading decision, hands down, was to read Slaughterhouse-Five . Yes, incredibly, I hadn’t ever read any Vonnegut, and Slaughterhouse-Five turned out to be a perfect place to start. Like with Vallejo , I had also been stockpiling recommendations, without ever making an incursion into Slaughterhouse-Five . Pynchon and Vonnegut actually dovetail, in my reading experience: I remember complaining bitterly about Gravity’s Rainbow to someone, and he said, oh, you got American war novels all wrong, you must turn to Slaughterhouse-Five at once. I didn’t. But then, roughly a year later, with her usual forcefulness, my friend Pilar Quintana made me vow to read...