I was going to write two paragraphs about every book I read. I didn’t even manage to keep up with the titles.

Since the Jonathan Carr biography of Mahler:

RJ Smith, The One: The Life and Music of James Brown (2012)
Jon Lee Anderson, Che: A Revolutionary Life (1998)
Guillermo Martínez, Crímenes imperceptibles (2003)
Margaret Drabble, The Middle Ground (1980)
Roberto Bolaño, Nocturno de Chile (2000)
Margaret Drabble, The Needle’s Eye (1972)

I’ve gotta review the James Brown bio, so I’ll have more to say about that one.

Jonathan Carr, a bureau chief for The Economist and other media outlets who died in 2008, wrote a short and highly readable biography of the composer Gustav Mahler in 1999. It’s an excellent example of at least two phenomena, both of which strike me as especially if not essentially British.

First, Carr is a superb amateur expert. There are experts on everything, and Carr was an expert on international relations in Europe. How dare he encroach upon the domain of classical music expertise, especially regarding a composer as sesudo as Mahler? It’s not like there aren’t other Mahler bios out there, and indeed Carr must contend
with–among other competitors–Henri Louis de La Grange’s multivolume life of the composer, which runs to over 3,000 pages (in French). There’s something refreshingly plucky about entering into the fray under such conditions, confident that one can make a productive contribution even this late in the game. My students would do well to emulate this attitude, staring at daunting bibliographies and charged with adding some value in the few short weeks of a semester.

Second, Carr is a serial debunker. The whole rhetorical strategy of his book is to upend established orthodox opinions regarding Mahler. He holds particular contempt for cultural theorist and philosopher Theodor Adorno for getting the interpretation wrong, and for Mahler’s wife Alma, for getting the facts wrong. Just about every paragraph seems to begin with some construction like, “While on the face of it, this may appear likely, a closer inspection of the evidence suggests that…” The debunker trick is a neat one, because it flatters the reader, who is presumed to know all this established wisdom and then accompanies the debunker on a journey reserved to the cognoscenti. Thing is, Carr debunks many things about which I–no expert, not by a long shot, but someone who has seen Mahler performed by a number of orchestras, who has all the symphonies on CD, many in multiple versions–was largely unaware. (Do you burn in indignation knowing that Mahler was “not allowed” to conduct Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony until he came to America? Is your anger appeased by learning that in fact that’s not true?) Moreover, a lot of the debunking is, in retrospect, more like adding nuance than controverting received wisdom. No matter. It’s a lively way to structure a book and encourages a complicity between author and reader. You both pretend all the way through that you know all these Mahler myths and it makes you more likely to accept the author’s version of events.

For both reasons–because the book was written by a particularly well-versed fan, and because it takes the reader under its wing as though he or she were a fellow insider–it fills a niche for Mahler lovers. It’s a fine companion to listening to the symphonies and the major song cycles, listening projects in which good companionship is warmly welcomed and positively productive.

Washington Cucurto is the nom de plume of Argentinian writer Santiago Vega; his 2008 novel entitled 1810. La revolución vivida por los negros (Emecé) is, among many other things, an exercise in alt-historical fiction. This genre was the subject of a recent article in the New Yorker by Thomas Mallon. Usually, these kind of books are aesthetically middlebrow and pretty earnest. They ask questions like: what if the South had won the Civil War? Or Germany World War II?

Cucurto’s book is not earnest, and asks slightly different questions, most of them about José de San Martí­n, father of Argentina’s independence from Spain. To wit: what if San Martí­n had been what we would call today a sex addict? What if the revolutionary Primera Junta regularly held explosive orgies in the venerable cabildo–literally explosive, so much so that the building blew up and San Martí­n had to round up the loyal Africans he had brought over as slaves, and then freed, to rebuild the structure? What if San Martí­n bastard son led an army of Peruvians (who nevertheless talk like 21st century Argentinians, like everyone else in this book) against his father’s troops, in an Oedipal struggle?

You can already see that Cucurto is not much interested in the too-clever tricks of the alt-history crowd. Sure, an orgy explodes city hall, but San Martí­n rebuilds it the next night and history goes on as before. And San Martí­n did in fact battle an army from Peru–it just wasn’t led, as far as we know, by his illegitimate son. I do like the suggestion that San Martí­n escaped to Africa–the land he truly loves–where he became the progenitor of all that continent’s 20th century dictators.

No, mostly this is a Rabelaisian tale of wild imagination in which rewriting history is just part of the baroque concatenation of ingredients. El realismo atolondrado, he calls it. But it did have me returning to Tulio Halperin’s history, Halperin being the Argentinian historian and Berkeley professor from whom I learned the real history decades ago as an undergraduate. To be sure, early on, Cucurto and Vega are discussing their project for an alternative history, and the latter suggests to the former that he consult the same source:

“Cucu, no seas boludo, agarrate un libro de Halperin Donghi y reescribilo.”

–¡Pero Halperin es más complicado que Proust!”

Which is not so wide of the mark.

Every book I read in Spanish introduces me to a new set of vocabulary, but this one is especially wild: tagui, choborra, jermu, garchar, partusear (it helps to know the French partouze), turro, emperribombar, chanta… None of them in my dictionary, and most of them probably not fit for a family-friendly blog.