Customer Reviews

Paradiso (Coleccion Archivos/Pitt Latin American Series)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was thrown a bit by the first, say, hundred or so pages of this monumental novel. What was going on with the almost unbearably baroque prose style? The author's very sentences, cluttered and clogged with obscure adjectives, parentheical asides, dangling clauses, incomprehensible imagery, seemed to be undermining the flow of his (admittedly digressive, non-linear) plot. I felt like no one was getting anywhere, which, after persevering for a few hundred more pages, I realized was the point. It would be all but impossible to synopsize this novel's central action--if you can even call it action, for, as in Proust and the Great Russian novels (which served as obvious models, it seems safe to say)--there's a lot more conversing than carrying on. There are great, chapters-long debates on homosexuality, philosophy, and politics. Evidently a voracious and learned reader, Lezama Lima seems to have tried to cram all of his knowledge into this, his one and only novel, which, again, is appropriate considering that the book itself seems to be about the totality of human existence (I'm still riddling this one out.) Once I became used to the style and to the rather lenghty debates, I realized that what I was immersed in was a masterpiece, a book as confusing, messy, overwhelming and beautiful as life itself. I can't say that every reader will warm to Paradiso--it is hard going from start to glorious finish--but I do believe that the book deserves a crtical reevaluation. Let's put it alongside not only Gabriel Garcia Maquez and Carlos Fuentes, but also Joyce, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Proust and see where it stands. I have the feeling it might be one of the more important books of the last century.

I would argue that Paradiso is the best novel of the 20th century. I don't believe this because of the plot; as a matter of fact, I don't really think there is much of a plot here. I say it because of factors that have to do with the author, the time in which he wrote this, and how those elements combined to make this incredible piece of literature.

A little bit of history: by the time Lezama Lima wrote this novel, he was already a well-known writer in Cuba. He and some friends had started a literary magazine, and actually, he was best known for his poetry. When Castro's revolution came to be in 1959, it marked the end of Cuba's literary life. Writers like Lezama Lima could keep writing so long as they wrote nothing controversial, nothing too "out there," nothing that could even hint a thought of anything that could be deemed "counter-revolutionary." And soon after Lezama Lima wrote Paradiso.

Now a little bit about the novel. Consider it, really, a long, endless conversation with many, many asides. It is complex if only because there are so many run-on sentences, so many thoughts and descriptions and details, that it's easy to lose track and just find yourself thinking, period. And I think that's what he was going for. The book covers just about everything: politics, ethics, philosophy, homosexuality, love, religion, etc. I thought when I read it that basically Lezama Lima just wanted to express his thoughts and opinions on everything (I later learned I was pretty correct about that, but more on that in a minute). What this brilliant man had to say is well-worth reading, even today.

But now, let's go back to the time and place when this was written. A few years after Castro came into power, and after he had declared his Communist intentions. With the publication of this novel, Lezama Lima's fate was sealed. As a homosexual man living in a country with a severely homophobic dictator, life had already been getting more and more difficult for him. But when Paradiso came out, he was officially declared "non-person" by the regime. For those unfamiliar with the concept, I will explain that being declared "non-person" essentially means just that: you cease to exist in the eyes of the government. You are erased from the history books, from the record books, you lose your job, people who visit you or have anything to do with you risk losing their government freebies and suffering reprisals. Lezama Lima was no longer a national literary treasure, and the man who up until that moment was considered one of the most respected writers in Latin America, was reduced to nothing.

I had the honor of meeting his younger sister a short while ago. She was sharing the contents of private letters between her and her brother from the years after the publication of Paradiso to those before his death. They revealed so much about Lezama Lima as a person, how he saw life, how he regarded his family (all of whom were in exile and whom he missed terribly). They reveal his gentleness, the tenderness he felt about nature, his family, his memories. And they also reveal the hell that his life had become: the loneliness, the constant vigilance, the pain he felt over what had become of his country.

Being privy to such an experience really only affirmed my thoughts about this novel. He must have known what lay in store for him, and yet it didn't stop him. He still wrote it. When the government demanded that he denounce his own book, the one he considered his masterpiece, his message to the world, in essence, he refused. It simply fills me with awe. For that alone the book is worth reading.

Jose Lezama Lima achieved one of the most complex and mesmerizing novels of the XXth century in Latin America. Paradiso is a Bildungsroman (a novel about an individual's growing process) as it is a Kunstroman (novel about the artist). The reader will find many references to Lezama's life, but his work goes beyond a self portrait. Jose Cemi is a little cuban boy who grows up having breathing problems, and grasping the lifes of those who were before him.
His individuality mixes with the other's and the result is a complex narrator, an overwhelming amount of literary, cultural and mythological references, a refined use of the metaphor and a hightened sense of reality. Cemi's world is more than nature... it is supernatural. Cemi attends to the world of death, as he remembers the lifes of his ancestors, as they are told to him by his mother Rialta, and grandmother Augusta. The first half of Paradiso is all about the family... then uncle Alberto's death marks a point of change in the novel. From that moment on, it focuses in Cemi's friendship with two other students: Fronesis and Focion. The three of them constitute a triangle in which homosexuality, love, erotism, unity, mythology and androginy are the main topics. As well as incest.
When this simbolic triangle breaks, Cemi is ready for the epiphany: he meets Oppiano Licario: a friend of his father who promised him, as he was dying, to look after his son (Cemi). Licario also witnessed Alberto's sexual iniciation. He is a poet, and he is the one who can bring Jose Cemi out of the time of desperation into a rythm of reflection and artistic contemplation.
There is so much more to this novel... You can only know what it is all about by reading it. I can here only give you a few pieces. As Lezama believed: only what is hard is really rewarding, and this is particularly true for young people.

Apart from Nabokov, there is no other writer whose prose offers so much sensuous and intellectual pleasure. The range of Lezama Lima's metaphors and similes is boundless. There were times when I wondered what he exactly meant by this or that passage, but the sheer pleasure kept me going. Highly recommended to the chalcenteric reader!

Lezama is not for everyone... to feel Paradiso there is a need to understand all his previous work: essays, poetry, short stories, critical and cultural studies. For those who have seriously study World Literature, there is no doubt that Lezama is one of the most important, sensible and imaginative writers of the XX century. You might not like him (and that is ok!) but to doubt his artistic greatness is nonsense. Once you enter the poetic system of Lezama the rewards are endless!

What a wild, untamed creature have we here! It shifts through light and dark, wakefulness and sleep, mundane and hallucinatory in an unabashed orgy of oneiric poetic prose. An example: "The August dry spell made sleep feverish. A terrible nightmare: palm leaves carried off by the high tide; at the edge of the water, we stretch out our hands to reach the leaves but a gust of wind carries them away on the waves. We wake up, gasping with a shout. The cat scratches the leaves and shreds them in the dust of the doorways."; and this selection is very mild, actually, compared with a great deal of the prose, truly phantasmagoric in parts and undulating with rich sexual imagery.

The reader being thus apprised, the plot, such as it is, is a fairly straightforward Bildungsroman of Jose Cemi. This novel has been compared to many other works, and its author to many other writers. But the writer to whom Lima bears the most resemblance is unquestionably Joyce; the style is comparable to that of Ulysses infused with animism, mysticism and mythomania. But the work it won't fail to remind the well-read reader of the most is Joyce's A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man. The friendship between Cemi, Fronesis and Focion and their effusive, aporetic debates at law school - which comprise the bulk of the novel - remind one of nothing so much as Joyce's Stephen Daedalus and his exchanges on aesthetics with his friends at Trinity College - except that the disquieting erudition of Cemi and his friends make Stephen and chums appear as babbling lower form lads by comparison. And, like Joyce's hero, Cemi recites his own creed of the artist-hero at the perihelion of his college days:

"Don't reject danger and always try what is most difficult. There's a danger that confronts us in the form of substitution, there's also a danger that sick people seek out, a sterile danger, the danger without epiphany. But when a man throughout his days has tested what is most difficult, he knows that he has lived in danger, and even though its existence has been silent, even though the succession of its waves has been peaceful, he knows that a day has been assigned to him in which he will be transfigured, and he will not see the fish inside the current but the fish in the starry basket of eternity."

I have only touched the tip of the iceberg here. I should have to delve into everything from Plotinus to Proust to do so - Lima, like Joyce, is not for everyone. I should particularly warn those afraid of dark, poetic sexual imagery - "the entrance of the dark grotto" and such. Thus, bowing to Lima, I shall leave what lies before the reader for him to relate in the words of Focion:

"Probably, my dear Cemi, you think my tale is taking on the aspect of a detective thriller, but this little story has everything, you have to follow it through numberless labyrinths until it finally reaches its best and most paradisiacal solution."

Yes, you do.

This and a handful of other literary creations rank among the best of the 20th century. It is a dense, jungle of images, language, against an elegant background. I can not think of another work to compare Paradiso to, as it stands alone. Once upon a time, I attempted to read it in Spanish, but was overcome by a tidal wave of intricate vocabulary.

It is unfortunate Lezama Lima has been largely forgotton in the US except for a few ardent readers. It is impossible to find any of his poems in translation. Maybe they are not so readily translatable. In any event, the translation of Paradiso is in itself an amazing achievement, as Paradiso explodes in volcanic beauty.

Some novelists are known for a pared down, no-nonsense approach to narrative, firmly delineated, plainspoken characters, crackling, lively dialogue, and swiftly moving, engrossing plots. Lezama-Lima is not one of those authors. It's hard to recommend a book that I have so many reservations about. Yes, the writing is occasionally beautiful, and as an historical document of a certain type of artistic and literary milieu in Pre-Castro Cuba, it's worth something. But I'm afraid that I'm going to have disagree with all of the reviewers here and say that LL's endless aestheticism must be something of an acquired taste. The problem is that he writes prose too much like a poet--all florid circumlocutions with no feel for the rhythms of everyday life and speech. No doubt he would have felt the everyday to be beneath his austere heights. Nobody talks the way his characters do--it's all lengthy, abstruse theorizing on frequently esoteric subjects. His essentially elitist approach to writing fiction would test the patience of anyone who looks to literature for a more immediate kind of connection. And, sorry, Mr. White, LL is not the Latin American Proust--Proust is far more readable and speaks to more basic human experiences.

Sometimes some of the worst snobs are those (i.e., homosexuals) who have themselves suffered the most heinous abuse because of their dubious social stature--rather than reject the values of the mainstream, a writer like LL ends up embodying them and perpetuating them to an infuriating degree through his snobbish affectations. Or else one could view his aesthetic vision as essentially escapist, understandable given the political situation in Cuba at the time. Still, a more accurate view of what was actually happening might have been of more human interest--it would have been valuable to see how these characters strained to maintain their sensibility in view of what was actually occurring around them. But, as it is, the book seems to exist in a vacuum with no real connection to the political situation in Cuba--its Eurocentric preoccupations offend.