[ The presentations
in this Blog try to avoid the handiworks of the reviewers’ arts, the cliché’s
of praise or blame, aesthetic theory, political dogma; the inevitable comparisons
to another or the author’s previous works;
attempts to establish the work in a hierarchy of interest and achievement. I
just want to let the author’s words speak for themselves, however useless one
or two brief passages may be to any effort to convey the full scope of the work
from which it has been taken. Sufficient and necessary to say in this case,
however, I have read few books where the notion ‘the humanities’ was ever
represented better.
This book is about James Earl Ray- the man who murdered Martin Luther King Jr.- and, for a large part of the novel- about the nine days the man spent in Lisbon, on the run from the law, his money and options inexorably dissipating- an imagining of Ray’s confrontation with the seals of his fate. It is also about the author’s own struggles as an aspiring author, the blockages incurred by his day job and the burdens of a young wife and growing family when he too had once tried to escape to Lisbon. But it is about much more than that.]
Gradually, in another future life, I began to realize that beauty, harmony, symmetry, are properties or spontaneous consequences of natural processes that exist without the need for an organizing intelligence, just as natural selection operates without an ultimate purpose, and certainly without a Supreme Being determining its laws in advance. The symmetry of a leaf or a tree or a body is self-organizing, a virtue of the instructions encoded in its DNA. The sinuous curves of a river or the ramifications of a delta draw themselves on a plane like the veins of a hand or a wave retreating from the sand. The highest aspiration of literature is not to improve an amorphous matter of real events through fiction, but to imitate the unpremeditated, yet vigorous, order of reality, to create a scale model of its forms and processes. Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Nature is a haunted house – but Art – a house that tries to be haunted.”
This book is about James Earl Ray- the man who murdered Martin Luther King Jr.- and, for a large part of the novel- about the nine days the man spent in Lisbon, on the run from the law, his money and options inexorably dissipating- an imagining of Ray’s confrontation with the seals of his fate. It is also about the author’s own struggles as an aspiring author, the blockages incurred by his day job and the burdens of a young wife and growing family when he too had once tried to escape to Lisbon. But it is about much more than that.]
Gradually, in another future life, I began to realize that beauty, harmony, symmetry, are properties or spontaneous consequences of natural processes that exist without the need for an organizing intelligence, just as natural selection operates without an ultimate purpose, and certainly without a Supreme Being determining its laws in advance. The symmetry of a leaf or a tree or a body is self-organizing, a virtue of the instructions encoded in its DNA. The sinuous curves of a river or the ramifications of a delta draw themselves on a plane like the veins of a hand or a wave retreating from the sand. The highest aspiration of literature is not to improve an amorphous matter of real events through fiction, but to imitate the unpremeditated, yet vigorous, order of reality, to create a scale model of its forms and processes. Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Nature is a haunted house – but Art – a house that tries to be haunted.”
. .
. . .
. . .
The novel simplifies life. It simplifies it and it tames it. It begets its own fever, especially when you intuit its end. I don’t want to watch films, or listen to music that isn’t spirituals, songs from the civil rights movement, and jazz from the time. I don’t ant to write articles, or give lectures, or plan trips, or see exhibits. All I need is a wooden desk and a laptop. If the laptop crashes or its battery dies, I would continue in a notebook. I don’t read anything that doesn’t have to do with my writing.
The novel subjects life to its own limits and at the same time opens it up to an exploration of depths that are within and without you and that only you were meant to discover. You are writing even when you don’t write. Narrative imagination does not feed on what it has invented; it feeds ion the past. Every minor or trivial event that one experiences or discovers in the course of an investigation can be valuable or even decisive for a novel, occupying a minimal but precise place within it, like an uneven cobblestone in a sidewalk in Lisbon.
I barely read the newspaper. I don’t bother to open magazines or packages with books. I have deleted myself without difficulty, and to great relief, from social networks. I’m exercising my right to an ancient form of solitude, disconnected from everything; dedicating my time to one thing, and doing so because that’s what I desire, for pleasure, the satisfaction of the process in and of itself; free, for now, from all the anxiety that is sure to come, the uncertainty of the result, the fear of hostile review, the emptiness or silence that will overcome me when the book is published and I wait to hear from the first unknown readers.
The Internet is the gateway to a vast archive where every day I discover new information that feeds my writing. Admirers from all over the world write to Ray asking for his autograph. A firefighter said he could not remember the shot but he did remember the rattling of the windows. Ray wrote over four hundred letters during his time in prison and they are preserved in the archives of Boston University. The store clerk who sold him binoculars around 4:15 on April 4 was surprised to see him in a suit and with a loose tie. At the Canadian embassy in London, the person who helped him fill out the passport application [there was a typo-error on the one he got in Toronto] said he held the pen and the forms as if he could not read or write.
When he was about to pay for something, he took money directly out of his pockets, instead of wallet. Several female witnesses not with displeasure the excessive amounts of hair pomade he wore. After the shot, King’s face looked as if it had been torn from front to back. At the jail in Memphis, he sang in the shower when he was in a good mood. The gush of blood from the wound reached the door of the room. Among other things that Ray left in the boardinghouse in Atlanta were maps of the southeastern United States, Texas, Oklahoma, Mexico, Louisiana, Los Angeles, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Birmingham.
Some people said he looked like an insurance agent, a door-to-door salesman, a preacher. In King’s pockets, at the time of his death, there were two ten dollar bills, a five, three ones, forty-five cents in change, a silver pen, various business cards and an appointment book for the year 1968 with black covers.
The novel has developed on its own with the unlimited richness of reality and the blank spaces I haven’t been tempted to fill, spaces in the shadows that cannot be illuminated, mostly because it has been too long, most of the witnesses have died, and the memory is quite fragile.
The novel is what I write and also the room where I work. The novel is the fine-point that ran out of ink one day when I wrote for five or six hours without stopping and filled an entire notebook. The novel is made of everything I know and everything I don’t know, and with the sensation of groping my way through this story but never finding a precise narrative outline. In 1977 James Earl Ray escaped from prison and remained on the run for fifty hours, chased by hundreds of armed officers, dogs, helicopters with searchlights, through a forest in the mountains of Tennessee. They found him hiding in a ditch, cold and starved, crouching under a layer of branches in an area infested with snakes.
The novel writes itself while I type away at the computer and also while I sit quietly and pensively with both hands on the edge of the table. It writes itself now as I travel on Tram 28 to meet with you at a pub you found on the corner of a sloping street, near the Bicas Elevator and the viewpoint of Santa Catarina. After dinner, we’re going to Caios de Sodre to see the lights of the bars and peek inside those doorways and stairways where he would have disappeared with women in tight skirts and high heels echoing on the stone steps.
Where does a story begin, where does it end? Don Quixote learns that Gines de Pasamonte, one of the criminals he released with great folly, is writing his autobiography. Don Quixote asked him if he has finished it, and Gines responds "How can it be finished, when my life is not yet finished?” We have been apart all afternoon and I’m dying to see you. Perhaps from the sidewalk, I will catch a glimpse of your face before you notice. To love the face is to love the soul.
Tram 28 rises and falls like a sailboat on the rolling waves of Lisbon’s hills. Alone in her room at the Lorraine Motel, her eyes wide open in the dark, stunned by the unreality of pain, hearing the sounds of police sirens and fire trucks in the distance, Memphis in flames, Georgia Davis notices a sound above her ceiling, a rubbing, a scraping. She comes out of her room and stands in the empty parking lot under the red, blue and yellow of the motel sign. On the second floor, in front of room 306, custodians work quietly, scrubbing with sponges and rags the wall, the door, the floor to erase traces of blood.
The novel simplifies life. It simplifies it and it tames it. It begets its own fever, especially when you intuit its end. I don’t want to watch films, or listen to music that isn’t spirituals, songs from the civil rights movement, and jazz from the time. I don’t ant to write articles, or give lectures, or plan trips, or see exhibits. All I need is a wooden desk and a laptop. If the laptop crashes or its battery dies, I would continue in a notebook. I don’t read anything that doesn’t have to do with my writing.
The novel subjects life to its own limits and at the same time opens it up to an exploration of depths that are within and without you and that only you were meant to discover. You are writing even when you don’t write. Narrative imagination does not feed on what it has invented; it feeds ion the past. Every minor or trivial event that one experiences or discovers in the course of an investigation can be valuable or even decisive for a novel, occupying a minimal but precise place within it, like an uneven cobblestone in a sidewalk in Lisbon.
I barely read the newspaper. I don’t bother to open magazines or packages with books. I have deleted myself without difficulty, and to great relief, from social networks. I’m exercising my right to an ancient form of solitude, disconnected from everything; dedicating my time to one thing, and doing so because that’s what I desire, for pleasure, the satisfaction of the process in and of itself; free, for now, from all the anxiety that is sure to come, the uncertainty of the result, the fear of hostile review, the emptiness or silence that will overcome me when the book is published and I wait to hear from the first unknown readers.
The Internet is the gateway to a vast archive where every day I discover new information that feeds my writing. Admirers from all over the world write to Ray asking for his autograph. A firefighter said he could not remember the shot but he did remember the rattling of the windows. Ray wrote over four hundred letters during his time in prison and they are preserved in the archives of Boston University. The store clerk who sold him binoculars around 4:15 on April 4 was surprised to see him in a suit and with a loose tie. At the Canadian embassy in London, the person who helped him fill out the passport application [there was a typo-error on the one he got in Toronto] said he held the pen and the forms as if he could not read or write.
When he was about to pay for something, he took money directly out of his pockets, instead of wallet. Several female witnesses not with displeasure the excessive amounts of hair pomade he wore. After the shot, King’s face looked as if it had been torn from front to back. At the jail in Memphis, he sang in the shower when he was in a good mood. The gush of blood from the wound reached the door of the room. Among other things that Ray left in the boardinghouse in Atlanta were maps of the southeastern United States, Texas, Oklahoma, Mexico, Louisiana, Los Angeles, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Birmingham.
Some people said he looked like an insurance agent, a door-to-door salesman, a preacher. In King’s pockets, at the time of his death, there were two ten dollar bills, a five, three ones, forty-five cents in change, a silver pen, various business cards and an appointment book for the year 1968 with black covers.
The novel has developed on its own with the unlimited richness of reality and the blank spaces I haven’t been tempted to fill, spaces in the shadows that cannot be illuminated, mostly because it has been too long, most of the witnesses have died, and the memory is quite fragile.
The novel is what I write and also the room where I work. The novel is the fine-point that ran out of ink one day when I wrote for five or six hours without stopping and filled an entire notebook. The novel is made of everything I know and everything I don’t know, and with the sensation of groping my way through this story but never finding a precise narrative outline. In 1977 James Earl Ray escaped from prison and remained on the run for fifty hours, chased by hundreds of armed officers, dogs, helicopters with searchlights, through a forest in the mountains of Tennessee. They found him hiding in a ditch, cold and starved, crouching under a layer of branches in an area infested with snakes.
The novel writes itself while I type away at the computer and also while I sit quietly and pensively with both hands on the edge of the table. It writes itself now as I travel on Tram 28 to meet with you at a pub you found on the corner of a sloping street, near the Bicas Elevator and the viewpoint of Santa Catarina. After dinner, we’re going to Caios de Sodre to see the lights of the bars and peek inside those doorways and stairways where he would have disappeared with women in tight skirts and high heels echoing on the stone steps.
Where does a story begin, where does it end? Don Quixote learns that Gines de Pasamonte, one of the criminals he released with great folly, is writing his autobiography. Don Quixote asked him if he has finished it, and Gines responds "How can it be finished, when my life is not yet finished?” We have been apart all afternoon and I’m dying to see you. Perhaps from the sidewalk, I will catch a glimpse of your face before you notice. To love the face is to love the soul.
Tram 28 rises and falls like a sailboat on the rolling waves of Lisbon’s hills. Alone in her room at the Lorraine Motel, her eyes wide open in the dark, stunned by the unreality of pain, hearing the sounds of police sirens and fire trucks in the distance, Memphis in flames, Georgia Davis notices a sound above her ceiling, a rubbing, a scraping. She comes out of her room and stands in the empty parking lot under the red, blue and yellow of the motel sign. On the second floor, in front of room 306, custodians work quietly, scrubbing with sponges and rags the wall, the door, the floor to erase traces of blood.
It is also a day to consider that as a man- an ordinary man- Martin had grown weary of the role that had been had been thrust upon him by circumstances and chance- felt uncomfortable as 'The Saint' he did not feel himself to be- the tiresome extravagances of baptist-type polemics he was called upon to perform, wary of the escalation of violent behavior by his 'followers' in Memphis and regretted that he had not chosen a quiet ministry somewhere in New England where his wife could have pursed her dreams in music. Yes, there is evidence of this, wonderfully pursued by Antonio Molina in his novel "Like a Fading Shadow', along with the trap in which his assassin also found himself in and for which Martin did not lack understanding or sympathy.
ReplyDelete