Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
The Writer takes us hurtling through the refracted funhouse of his recursive and referential-maniac mind with a host of debut performances and redux appearances: the howling ghost of electricity and the defective Mr. Trip; the wuthering and heightened Penelope and her lost son; 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner; the absent Pertusato, Nicolasito and the omnipresent IKEA; the dead Colma, the deceased ZZYZX, the departed Nothing, and the immortal Sad Songs; the irrealist Vladimir Nabokov and the surrealist Karmas; Wish You Were Here playing on (im)mobil(izing) phones and Dracula being invited in; the disturbed Uncle Hey Walrus and parents who are models but not at all model parents; The Beatles and The Beatles; a nonexistent country of origin and a city in flames; an unforgettable night that wants nothing more than to be rewritten; and so many more accelerated particles and freewheeling fragments and interlinked cells searching for a storyline to give them some structure, some meaning.
With mordant wit, capacious intelligence, and vertiginous prose, The Remembered Part closes Rodrigo Fresán’s sprawling tryptic novel. A novel that has at its heart the three component parts of literary creation, the engines that drive the writing of fictional lives and the narration of real works of art: invention, dream, and memory. It is a masterpiece by one of contemporary literature’s most daring and innovative writers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781948830546 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Letter |
| Publication date: | 06/14/2022 |
| Series: | Spanish Literature Series |
| Pages: | 760 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Will Vanderhyden received an MA in Literary Translation Studies from the University of Rochester. He has translated fiction by Carlos Labbé, Edgardo Cozarinsky, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Juan Marsé, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Rodrigo Fresán, and Elvio Gandolfo. He received NEA and Lannan fellowships to translate another of Fresán’s novels, The Invented Part.
Read an Excerpt
How to go on—now that everything that has to happen has happened—and come to the end; the end being, he remembers now, all that’s left to come to pass, the last thing to become present and future.
Or better:
How to come to the end—now that everything that had to happen has happened—when you cannot go on?
How to stop and think that there’s nothing else out there for you?
Nothing left to live or to say or to write or to read or to invent, but, even still, dreaming that everything he has left to remember is impossible to forget; and yet, to tell the truth, there’s nothing he wants more than to be able to forget it.
Yes, the best of both worlds, he tells himself, high above the world. In too many airplanes, forgotten until they all blend together into one. Flying over a singular and immemorial desert that contains all deserts.
Above and below.
But both parts like part of a single action: like two movements, entrance and exit, ascent and descent. Like when you take a deep breath, hold it in, and sink back under water. And stay there until you lose all notion of space and time. Holding on until you can’t hold on any longer but knowing you must rise to the surface slowly and carefully to avoid the bubbling of blood and the boiling of neurons.
Again, best of all, one option in two times: The End / To Be Continued . . .
And between the goodbye and the until we meet again—with all the past yet to come— there he is.
Up in the blue sky and down on the yellow earth.
Hanging from the ends of respective question marks, where two chains are hooked that reach down to the seat that connects them. To that place where he can swing back and forth and think about how to keep thinking about how to come to an end, but only after having not yet begun—because that was never his style as a writer, though it was his style, on more than one occasion, as a reader—like so many novels written in the middle of the twentieth century.
To begin with a question.
With a character saying something like, “And what can we do now to bring everything that’s been happening not to good endpoint but to a good airport?” Backing up in order to move forward, swinging along the same brief yet sweeping trajectory of the pendulum that first hypnotizes and then orders you to do this or that thing you would never do in your right mind and of your own volition. Inappropriate behaviors, unconscious actions, believing you’re a dog, compulsively howling at the end of a song about having read the book and loving to turn you on, etc.
And, at the same time, those question marks functioning as a red STOP and a green WALK. And there he is, somewhere between the one and the other, hesitating at that yellow, neither stopping nor walking: that jaundiced yellow that has nothing to do with the sunflowery Kodak yellow meant for capturing and preserving memories or with the yellow of that always-yet-to-come taxi, a taxi that, on more than one occasion, you wait for in vain out in the rain, hand held aloft until it cramps, with a whistling in your eyes, begging for it to pull up so you can get in and be swept off to some better place. No. It’s a different yellow. It’s an ex-yellow. That color that once was yellow and that, really, is the sepia of memory. The pale and flashing intermediate color signaling that everything is about to change. And to cross or not to cross, that is a question you must answer for yourself, to be run over in the middle of the street or to arrive safely to the other side, back in days when, if there were an accident, passersby would have stopped to offer a helping hand instead of stopping to take pictures, pictures that, back then, would have cost a lot and taken a long time to have developed.
And in that way, starting out to welcome the end. Signs flashing at the same time, but separate, on posts facing each other across a road, but as if in conversation: arrows that point in opposite directions, but that, he suspects, will wind up converging sooner or later. Signs that led him here. Guidelines that left his disoriented, using those question marks to wonder if he hadn’t already written something like all of this in the opening pages of one of his books.
The opening pages of the last book he wrote.
And what he’d written in his last book hadn’t turned out to be tour de force but a forced tour. Along a wide avenue—The Widest Avenue in the World-yet—dodging the vehicles of so many things and so many people. Something that, more than unforgettable, ended up being—it wasn’t the same thing though it seemed to be—impossible to not remember. Just like it wasn’t the same to go off to fight in the Battle of Waterloo knowing full well what it was you were doing as it was to—only after the fact—find yourself out there wandering around with no clue what that chaos and clamor of battles within battles was all about, no clue that it was the sound and fury of one of war’s greatest hits.
Yes: to make history was one thing, to be history was something else entirely.
And so now he asks himself whether or not he remembers having invented or dreamed his memories. Because his memories had the liquid cadence of dreams and the futuristic quality of inventions; because what you think happened and what you remember happening end up being the same thing that, in another time and another place, without hesitation or delay, he would have turned into a slew of letters, a string of words, a stack of pages.
After all, “to recall” was a synonym of “to remember.” And, for that reason, maybe what happened was that you ended up recalling what you remembered: you reached an agreement when it came to memory, you signed a truce halfway between what happened and what you recalled happening.
Then he asks himself if he remembers or if he recalls.
And he answers that . . .