Oh,
how I wish a dozen of our leading literary lights, critics such as
James Wood, Parul Sehgal, Dustin Illingworth, Michiko Kakutani, Dwight Garner and Jonathan
Lethem would each contribute an essay to a book devoted to Argentine
author Rodrigo Fresán's The Dreamed Part.
Such a volume of
critical commentary would be most helpful since, with this novel under
review, Rodrigo Fresán expands what it means to write maximalist fiction
of the highest caliber. You want a main character who is an exwriter
(author's word) musing on sleep, dreams and the waking life, you want
elements of science fiction and splashes of biography, you want
extensive literary critique, you want the inclusion of popular culture
(Bob Dylan, The Beatles, et al.) and philosophy (Plato, Hegel,
Nietzsche, Cioran, et al.), you want multiple narrative pathways with
hundreds and hundreds of literary refrences with a list that includes
the likes of the Brontë sisters, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Nabokov,
Vila-Matas, Kundera, Sebald, Auster and Austen – step right up, folks, The Dreamed Part is undoubtedly your book. Special call-out to translator Will Vanderhyden, winner of the 2018 Best Translated Book Award.
We first met the unnamed narrator in The Invented Parts
back when he was a writer of novels with a metaphysical death wish – to
hurl himself in the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva in order to merge
with the cosmos. But, alas, he failed (natch) and the writer now finds
himself as an ex-writer due to an incurable case of insomnia. Sidebar:
This Rodrigo Fresán cycle of three novels includes Volume 1: The Invented Part (I wrote a seperate review), Volume 2: The Dreamed Part and Volume 3: The Remembered Part due to be published April, 2022.
So much happening in The Dreamed Part.
For the purposes of my review, I'll focus on the first fifty pages
where our protein author begins to lay the groundwork for much that
follows. I'll do this by linking my comments to a bushel basket of
direct quotes:
“The text – in the most suspended of animations –
opening its eyes when the book opens, every time it is read, as if upon
entering that place a light turns on so the light can shine out.”
Such
an intriguing way to look at reading: when we open a book, it's as if a
light automatically turns on, providing light enough to illuminate a
reader, reminiscent of Ezra Pound's famous: “Man reading should be man
intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
“With
that combination of devotion and fear that overcomes you, in the dark,
watching a luminous and illuminating loved-one sleep. And, just then,
acknowledging and being fully aware, inside a darkness all our own, that
the person we love will never be entirely open, known, legible, and
comprehensible to us.”
Much of the novel consists of internal
monologue. The writing is so fluid we hardly ever notice the absence of
traditional dialogue. Here the exwriter reflects on the darkness of our
waking state where we are forever separated from one another, even from a
loved one. Counterposed against the waking state, we have deep sleep
where all humanity (and all of life) come together. Yes, echoes of The
Beatles.
“The books remain, the work, yes. But in the past, and
ever further from life itself, and as if they were no longer yours.
Because if that mysterious mechanism that turns on during (in the
most private and ineffable moment of the profession, in the act of
writing itself) isn't cyclically rereleased, everything written in the
past begins to reject the author.”
The tragedy for the exwriter
(and all writers who wish to write but can no longer write): not only
are you incapable of writing in the present but all your previous works
actively turn their back on you and run away, fast! And not only do we
have the exwriter but The Dreamed Part also spotlights the
exwriter's sister Penelope, a writer of a series of novels about three
sisters (loosely based on the Brontë sisters) who live on the moon.
Recall I mentioned science fiction back there.
“Few things are
more fragile than someone who has been left without words and whose
infrequent handwriting, always, seems to spring forth from the private
earthquake of that atrophied claw, once a flexible hand of movement both
harmonious and forceful, like a conductor...Now, the emperor's thumb
forever pointing down, making it impossible to even sustain the weight
of a pen and its ink.”
Thanks, Rodrigo! What an incredibly
powerful image to express the dilemma for someone who can no longer
write – even the very act of holding a pen (or, by extension, sitting at
a computer keyboard) becomes sheer torture.
“Foot-tapping
footnotes that lose more readers than telling dreams. And that make you
lose more listeners – like reading with the ears – than speeches.”
Through
his exwriter narrator, it is as if Rodrigo admits the conundrum of a
novelist who starts to write about dreams – that novelist stands to lose
many of his or her readers. Same thing goes for a novelist who
incorporates footnotes – many readers will either skim the footnotes or
not read them at all. And too many footnotes might force readers to
simply stop reading the novel. In this respect, Rodrigo is spot-on –
he's written a challenging novel that's a doorstop (545 pages) with many
recounted dreams and oodles of footnotes.
“A voice that's like
the flipside of a language and not the language it speaks, as if it were
the shadow of the voice and not the voice itself speaking.”
Ah,
narrative voice, one of the great strengths of Rodrigo Fresán's writing
where the words embody turbocharged vitality and exuberance.
“Dreams are an aesthetic work, perhaps the earliest aesthetic expression.”
Think
about this statement. Do you remember your own dreams? Do those
powerful, memorable dreams you recall possess the qualities of a well
crafted short story or a vivid work of art?
“Or, at the very
least, he could make use of the network of secret tunnels that lead to
the Onirium and where the people who work there move, coming and going.
Sleepless. The inexact scientists who study the inexact science of
dreams. The people who committed the dark error that awoke The White
Plague.”
One of the more intriguing parts of the first section of
the novel: dreams appear to be sold to and studied by an organization
known as the Onirium. I say “appear” since the dreamed part of The Dreamed Part
consists of much dreaminess, a Strawberry Fields land where nothing is
clear and nothing to get hung about. Can we say the same thing about the
White Plague plunging an entire population into life without dreams?
You'll have to read and judge for yourself.
The Dreamed Part is a novel for avid readers and dedicated dreamers along with those inspired beings willing to take on the fabulous Fresán.
Argentine author Rodrigo Fresán, born 1963
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