The Non-Book Stuff

The big event in April was Semana Santa but having witnessed the spectacle up close the two previous years, I was happy to give it and the crowds a pass this time. The only procession I watched materialized at 3:30 in the morning a half-block from our apartment as I was awakened by drums that reverberated in the neighborhood. Fully awake after a few minutes, I decided to throw a sweater over my sleep shirt and pants and hurry down the street. I was in time to watch the last of the robed and hooded penitents glide in advance of a candle-lit Virgen perched atop a large platform and borne on the shoulders of the parish brotherhood. Called thrones, these platforms weigh between seven and nine thousand pounds, requiring the synchronized steps of the throne bearers, which I suppose is one of the functions of the drums. It’s hard not to be captivated, even for a non-religious person like me. The throne sways, the silent, hooded penitents slow-march. They file past, illumined by candles and street lamps, and then recede into the night to the pulse of the drums.

 

The Book Stuff

Following Semana Santa was another week-long celebration, one that I could more easily relate to and participate in—Global Book Crawl. A supremely secular event, though love and reverence are involved, it had its inception in a Málaga bookstore, Libreria Luces, which along with a bookstore in Ireland and one in New York launched the celebration to promote literature.

Málaga was one of four participating cities in Spain. Five cities in the US took part. Ireland at 19 participating cities wins for bookishness. The objective in Málaga (each city could set its own parameters) was to visit all twelve of the participating independent bookstores and get a “passport” stamped at each one. Prior to the Crawl, I’d only visited six of the twelve on the list. The event allowed me to discover my new favorite bookstore Libreria Suburbia, about a mile from our apartment. It’s located on this lovely little street and the store itself is a little gem. It’s a librería asociativa, a community space and collective managed by its members.

I ended the crawl having bought five books, all in Spanish. Yikes, when will I read them all? The one I’m reading now is by the Austrian Stefan Zweig who emigrated to Brazil prior to World War II. I’d never read him, but I see his books everywhere here in Málaga and Madrid. Wikipedia says, “At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most widely translated and popular writers in the world.” So now I’m reading a Spanish translation from the German though the English version is available on Kindle.

These books joined a few others I picked up earlier this month while in Madrid. I like looking at bookstore window displays, and Libreria Antonio Machado in the Circulo de Bellas Artes has a great window of books. It’s where I saw Memorias de España 1937 by Elena Garro. I knew of Garro from a podcast I’d listened to a couple of years ago. She had a fraught twelve-year marriage to Mexican Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz and a career that might’ve reaped more rewards had she not been maligned by the Mexican literary and political community. She’s considered one of the pioneers of magical realism, though sadly, few have heard of her compared to her male contemporaries. Anyway, as soon as I spotted the book in the window, I knew I wanted it and went inside to buy it. It’s about the year she spent in Spain with Paz in the middle of the Spanish Civil War.

During that trip to Madrid, I visited Casa Árabe, the Arab cultural center in Madrid, with my friend Claudio. We saw a comics exhibit by Palestinian artists and then made our way to the small bookstore. I picked up a book called Adios, Tánger by the young Moroccan writer Salma El Moumni. The author at only 26 years old, has received acclaim and prizes for her book, written in French. I had hoped to find an English translation, but one doesn’t yet exist. The book appears to be available in French, Italian, and Spanish. So Spanish it is.

I’ve just finished reading La loca de la casa by Rosa Montero, yes, in Spanish! I don’t think the book is available in English but here’s a description in Google-translated English of the book’s contents.

The Madwoman of the House is Rosa Montero’s most personal work, a journey through the intricacies of fantasy, artistic creation, and the most secret memories. It is a magician’s chest from which unexpected and astonishing objects emerge. “Imagination is the madwoman of the house.” Saint Teresa of Jesus. This book is a novel, an essay, an autobiography. In it, the author embarks on an inward journey in a narrative game full of surprises. In The Madwoman of the House, literature and life blend in an aphrodisiac cocktail of other people’s biographies and fictionalized autobiography. And so, we discover that the great Goethe flattered the powerful to ridiculous extremes, that Tolstoy was a lunatic, that Montero, as a child, was a dwarf, and that, at twenty-three, she had a bizarre and hilarious romance with a famous actor. But we shouldn’t trust everything the author tells us about herself: memories are not always what they seem. A book about fantasy and dreams, about madness and passion, about the fears and doubts of writers, but also of readers.

Next, I’ll read Montero’s hybrid non-fiction book that’s part personal memoir and part biography of Marie Curie. It’s called La ridícula idea de no volver a verte (The Ridiculous Idea of Not Seeing You Again).

I was sad to learn mid-month of the death of Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, whose work I first read in a class on Contemporary Latin American Literature back in 1978. When I had to give away my collection of books before leaving Seattle for Málaga, several of his books were among the over 900 books that had survived the first purge when we moved from a house to an apartment in 2019. On my way to a weekly appointment, I often stop in at ReRead, a used-books store where the books cost around 4 euros so it’s hard to walk out emptyhanded. A few days after Vargas Llosa’s death, I bought a book of three of his short works.

Turns out Vargas Llosa had a connection to the Costa del Sol. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Málaga and spent summers in Marbella, a resort city an hour’s drive along the coast from Málaga with luxury yachts, golf courses, celebrated nightclubs, and the renowned Clinica Buchinger, which Vargas Llosa frequented for health treatments.

Finding a Writing Community

While I can’t replicate the incredible writing community I was part of when I lived in Seattle, I’m excited about having recently joined the European Writers Salon, “a travelling salon for writers across Europe to connect online and in person.”  I participated in their April online reading, sharing a flash essay that will be published this year in the anthology The Overturning from Hypertext. I’ll also participate in the European Writers Salon quarterly online book club. The first book up for discussion in May is The Details by Swedish writer Ia Genberg. And I’ve signed up to attend the weekend salon in Brussels in September, where I’ll be able to meet writers in person!

A Surprise in the New Apartment

We’ve been in our new apartment for over a month now.  We’ve come across things left behind by, we assume, previous tenants, things like a collection of used lightbulbs, an industrial-size container of hand sanitizer, and nearly empty cans of roach killer.

In my bedroom, there’s an ornate gilt mirror that hangs above the marble-topped Italianate dresser. I like the mirror more as an adornment than as a utilitarian object in which to check my teeth for food or for stick-up hair after a nap, things I normally do in the bathroom mirror. My eyes usually just sweep past the pretty mirror in the bedroom. But the other day I  discovered something else. It happened to be World Book Day, commemorating Shakespeare and Cervantes who share or, by some differing accounts, nearly share the same day of departure from this earth. It was also the birthday of American author Charles Johnson, writer, cartoonist, martial artist, and student of Buddhism and Eastern philosophy. So let’s just say it was an auspicious day. After well over a month of sleeping in this room, my eye finally lit upon a tiny figurine perched on the scroll of the mirror frame, in which it blended perfectly. I was alone in the apartment at the time, so my little cry of delight was like a secret, audible to no one but me. I picked up the tiny object for a moment and let it rest in my hand before returning it to its place.