In Remembrance of Oaxaca Past

I'm back.

Duffy and I spent the summer eating grasshoppers and watching the world cup and drinking distilled cactus (that's mezcal to you) and swinging in hammocks and meeting freaky people who had been to Oaxaca 30 times (that's true) scratching mosquito bites and trying not to spend too much time holding each other's hair back while we leaned over Mexican toilets. (By the way, public toilets in the developing world get a bad rap. The key is go to fancy restaurants. Outstanding toilets). We mostly succeeded in not getting sick. Let me just say this about the owner of the Spanish restaurant facing Parque Juarez in Barrio Jalatlaco. Don't take his recommendation and eat a stringy steak swimming in blood. Even if he serves it to you himself with a huge smile, especially then, because that smile says I eat people.

Now of course we've been back for two uneven months of America but I feel that the recent news of a an American journalist getting fatally shot in downtown Oaxaca by shadowy state government police may not mark the end of our trip exactly, but the end of an era. Even with the simmering troubles all summer (which I won't go into here; there are about 100 blogs about it) the streets were teeming with willowy white Americans in natural fibers trying to get lost in the real Mexico (and also Duffy who insists on wearing heavy black dress shoes in the summer and me being neither white nor willowy). Now, probably not so much. On the bright side, the citizens won't have to put up with so many flying hacky sacks.

Anyway, I don't mean to just be glib. The fatalities happening (not just the American) are tragic. And a lot are probably being covered up. But I think the struggle to oust the corrupt smiling governor has a righteous goal. Some of the hippies who go to Oaxaca too much were complaining and saying that the teachers occupying the streets had gone too far and that they liked Oaxaca because it wasn't all unresty like Chiapas. Me? I wish all of the alienated and disgruntled Americans I know (including the one sitting at the computer right now) had a fraction of the hardcore spirit of people who will sleep in the Mexican street in the summer with their families to face down shadowy paramilitary groups in the name of democracy.

So the reading report. This summer, the team set out with Vol 1-4 of Proust's In Remembrance of Things Past, Vilette, Gravity's Rainbow, Madame Bovary and Bleak House. Toward the end I cheated and put aside the final volume of Proust and read Elizabeth Costello. Everything was mostly read, except here's a riddle. A (heterosexual) couple goes on a trip. One reads Vilette. The other reads Gravity's Rainbow. Can you guess which was read by the woman and which by the man? Can you?

Considering how long most of these books are, this post could go on for a lifetime of sitting in a cork-lined room. (I, like Proust, am also a sensitive asthmatic). But an awesome thing about this reading list is I could now laugh at the Proust jokes in "Little Miss Sunshine." That license plate! Hilarious! Also, last week I was reading an old New Yorker at the gym, which contained a Milan Kundera essay that discussed Flaubert and Proust. Well, when I first scanned the synopsis, I was like, "Oh yeah, that stuff I haven't read" -- but then I had! I'm educated, you fools.

Now the advice section. Okay, I'll admit it was me, the girl, who read Vilette. And I'm not sorry I wasn't the egg head reading Gravity's Rainbow by the pool. I mean, how does that look? But I'm a little sorry that Charlotte Bronte didn't get to have a full-on proper affair with the grumpy old dark haired man she spent her career writing about. Because then Vilette might have been a lot more interesting. I did however enjoy the crazy rants about Catholicism and the superiority of the English church. They made a pleasant frisson with feverish obsession with various gold-plated Oaxaca-area churches. I can't bring myself to say don't read Vilette. But, you know, somewhere in the Kundera piece is the phrase, life is short and books are long.

Bleak House is awesome and Madame Bovary is hilarious. Elizabeth Costello is somewhat inscrutable, but works like a palate cleanser if you've read two volumes of Proust in a row and it's 90 degrees.

That brings me to Proust. Well. There are only a handful of writers whose names become adjectives. I have read almost four volumes of Proust and I'm not totally sure what his adjective means. I knew nothing about Proust except that there was a cookie and he was an adjective. So I was suprised by:

--the incredibly detailed and often tedious renderings of 19th century French society

--the incredible anti-Semitism and pettiness of 19th century French society (I know, I'm a fool)

--the lengthy theories about "inverts" (and it turns out Proust was an "invert")

--the revelation that using so, so many words to describe every interaction can have the effect of sensitizing the reader as well as numbing her . . . which is to say that moments of high emotion in these books are unbelievably compelling, particularly when it comes to young aristocrats' obsessions with shady ladies.

Maybe the last one is the definition of Proustian? I don't know. My advice, however is to at least read the first volume, titled in the newer translation In Remembrance of Things Past. Then it gets a little hard. The second half of the third volume, now titled The Guermantes Way, is stunning. But you better be prepared to go to a lot of incredibly boring and anti-Semitic parties to get there.

Of course there is one joy you will miss if you peter out before volumes 3-4. That is reading about "Madame Putbus' lady's maid" over and over again. Tee-hee.

Putbus.