#luiselli

[commetombeunarbre]

Mijn notitieboekjes. Zo jammerlijk gevuld, he ene met onmacht, het andere met leeg, zinloos afwachten. De moeilijkste, meest pijnlijke vorm van wachten: het wachten op jezelf. Als ik er iets in zou schrijven, zou het de bekentenis zijn dat het ook ik te lang op mezelf gewacht heb, en dat ik niet ben komen opdagen.

[sublecturas]

“Desierto Sonoro”, de  Valeria Luiselli

[alberthgr]

[wilsonltaylor]

Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (2019)

Perhaps I should say that documenting is when you add thing plus light, light minus thing, photograph after photograph; or when you add sound, plus silence, minus sound, minus silence. What you have, in the end, are all the moments that didn’t form part of the actual experience. A sequence of interruptions, holes, missing parts, cut out from the moment in which the experience took place. Because experience, plus a document of the experience, is experience minus one. The strange thing is this: if, in the future one day, you add all those documents together again, what you have, all over again, is the experience. Or at least a version of the experience that replaces the lived experience, even if what you originally documented were the moments you cut from it. ... I’m not sure, though, what “for later” means anymore. Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it. We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we call can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises. We haven’t understood the exact way we are now experiencing time. And maybe the boy’s frustration at not knowing what to take a picture of, or how to frame and focus the things he sees as we all sit inside the car, driving across this strange, beautiful, dark country, is simply a sign of how our ways of documenting the world have fallen short. Perhaps if we found a new way to document it, we might begin to understand this new way we experience space and time. Novels and movies don’t quite capture it; journalism doesn’t; photography, dance, painting, and theater don’t; molecular biology and quantum physics certainly don’t either. We haven’t understood how space and time exist now, how we really experience them. And until we find a way to document them, we will not understand them. Finally, I tell the boy:

You just have to find your own way of understanding space, so that the rest of us can feel less lost in time.

[r1aimageandtext]

Weekly RR #11

As the story progressed, I became more sympathetic towards Highway. Despite coming off as a self-centered auctioneer, who for a certain time period lives a lavish life by his successful auctioneering skills, Highway was essentially deprived of becoming a fatherly figure. It was eventually acknowledged that Flaca, Highway’s former wife, had left Highway, taking Siddhartha with her. This made me realize that Highway was never intentional in leaving his son, in fact he did financially support him for 18 years but for selfish reasons, Flaca never gave Highway the opportunity to form an intimate relationship with his son. It’s irksome to know that Highway was kidnapped, mentally tortured and humiliated by his son, who also took everything that Highway owned, including his beloved Marilyn Monroe teeth. Highway’s story is one that involves personal success and achievement, along with understanding the value of art but an underlying aspect to the story that is equally important and not given much focus is the relationship between a father and son. The story does end with Highway’s message to his son “I’m sorry I got you into trouble, and that you’re in prison, and that I wasn’t the best of fathers. I also didn’t get round to finding all the things you requested. But here are my teeth, and your glass of water. You can also keep all my collectibles, and the Marilyn Monroe teeth, which were false anyways” (Luiselli 159). This heart felt moment is meaningful but questionable in regards to the falsehood of the teeth that Highway gave high value to. Why, after knowing that the teeth were false, did Highway pronounce the teeth to be Marilyn’s? How would this change the meaning of the story, if it wasn’t for the teeth of Marilyn Monroe?

[r1aimageandtext]

Reading Response 11

I found the ending of Book six to be particularly interesting for a couple of reasons. The first is his death note which he leaves for his son. In it, he acknowledges that his Marylin Monroe teeth were false the whole time. This made me wonder how sane Highway actually was. After hearing his story, I had resigned myself to the fact that he was an unreliable narrator with an extremely naive outlook on life. However, this line makes me wonder if he knew he sounded ridiculous the entire time. The book overall has such an ambiguous tone that the knowledge of Highway’s mental well being could change one’s reading of it.

The second reason I found it interesting was due to his choice of death rite. His last request was for his ashes to be spread “at the feet of the fiberglass dinosaurs in the median strip of a street in Pachuca” (Luiselli 158). Why did he want his ashes scattered at these dinosaurs? Is there any significance to this moment or is it just another quirk of his?

[r1aimageandtext]

Weekly Reading Response #11

I found chapter six of “The Story of my Teeth” particularly interesting because readers finally got to see Highway from a perspective other than his own. While Voragine’s perspective of Highway was biased, readers can still piece together some of Highway’s new flaws (which he does not mention about himself). For example, when Voragine says “it had less to do with lying than surpassing the truth,” readers can see one of Highway’s flaws of allowing his overly optimistic personality to cloud his judgement and how it was starting to rub off on Voragine. While this section was very subjective, Voragine also described a few objective topics such as Highway’s physical appearance. I found it interesting that Luiselli decided to include a description of Highway’s physical appearance so late in the book as it allowed readers to create their own mental image of Highway based on his personality beforehand.

[r1aimageandtext]

Weekly Reading Response #11

In The Story of My Teeth, Luiselli includes the “Afterword” in order to frame the translation and provide the origins of the story. Primarily, the section is interesting as it describes chapter seven as being written by Luiselli's translator, Christina MacSweeney. The Chronologic section only appears in the English translation, which Luiselli considered an entirely different book. While chapter seven sets a direct timeline of the events in the novel, it also combines other outside dates, particularly in reference to works of art and other vague historical events. As a result, though not being written by Luiselli herself, the chapter flows in a similar style to the previous narrative. However, the ending as a whole creates some ambiguity. What is the importance of the Chronologic section? Does it add to the translation of the novel and its coherency? It may be essential to discuss the ending section in relation to Luiselli's ideas on translation (a collaborative effort that does not connect both languages exactly). Overall, the "Afterword" provides some plot line explanation, but brings up questions in terms of the addition of chapter seven and the validity of the translation.