...has died. The Argentine journalist, who for a number of years headed the Latin American studies department at Rutgers, was also a novelist whose books played with reality, Santa Evita perhaps the emblem of the genre. What genre, I'm not certain, but Tomas did it masterfully. The story of an investigative reporter on the hunt to find Eva Peron's body, the book is carefully footnoted to the point that it's nearly impossible to distinguish what came out of the author's mind and what the reader can actually google.
I have two photos of Tomas, neither very good, taken at book club at our house in 2006. The backstory: as previously reported, I often take the train back and forth to New York. As some measure of my particular karma, I often meet a writer on that journey. As karmas go, this is a good one.
But sometimes I'm very tired on these trips and don't want to talk to anyone at all. Such was the case early one Sunday evening in 2006 when I was a little late getting on the train. There were only a few seats available and I chose the one where I anticipated the least interaction--a couple sitting opposite each other, both with their laptops running. I sat down next to the woman (Gabriela Esquivada, far right in photo), we exchanged smiles, and I settled in for a rest.
A few minutes later, Gabriela asked if she could get by, then offered to get me a coffee for disturbing me...and we were off and running. She introduced me to her husband, who was deep in concentration, watching some sort of thriller, as I recall...and then she explained who he was, one of the great Latin American writers, and soon all of us were talking. (It was from Tomas that I later learned that Carlos Fuentes loves bluefish, a phrase that will eventually make it into an essay about such train encounters, drafted so far only in my head.)
But why were they coming to Boston? Tomas turned the right side of his head toward me, a very large and red scar searing down the side, just behind his ear. Glioblastoma, he said, and he was being treated here in Boston.
We struck up a friendship and a month or so later, Tomas and Gabriela, also an Argentine journalist and editor, came to book club. I wrote a note about the evening for my friends on Zoetrope (see below). About two years ago, we lost touch. I was sad to see the news this morning but amazed that he lived for so long with this terrible disease.
From my notes:
Tomas Eloy Martinez came to our book club last night
to discuss Santa Evita. So far, Tomas has written seven
novels, I believe, and a whole lot of journalism down the years, but has not
had as much exposure in the US as abroad, at 71 not as familiar as other Lat
American writers, Carlos Fuentes, for example, whom he’s known since he was 18
(Fuentes is 10 years older). One
of Tomas’s books, unpublished in the US, The Flight of the Queen has sold 500k sales globally, many translations, best foreign book
in China (dunno year), and on. I found this interview
with him in Three Monkeys Online and it squares with what I’ve been learning
from him, worth reading.
Tomas and Gabriela Esquivada-Martinez, his wife, have been here in Boston for past couple of months where Tomas is being treated for brain tumor. I met them in early March on the train from NY to Boston ten days after his surgery; they were traveling to Boston from their home in Highland Park, NJ, where he’s been heading Lat Amer studies dept at Rutgers. Mission: his first round of chemo and radiation. When I picked them up last night, I expected him to look haggard and ill. He looks great. His incision is healing and he spoke well and clearly for many hours.
Tomas focused on the line between fiction and fact, blurry, saying that the woman writing the intro to the anthology of his work being pub’d in Venezuela (hope I’ve got this right) finds the theme of his work to be “doubt.” I agree, caveat being that I’ve only read one of his books…but it is impossible to know, reading it, whether it is fact or fiction. How could this be a novel, I kept asking myself, but Tomas told us last night that only the last three pages are true. He entered the “black hole” of nine missing months in Eva Peron’s history and from it spun this book. Very dark, no redeeming characters, except perhaps the “I” who appears late in the book, relatively speaking, and is never fully revealed.
My book club has been meeting for 15 or so years, monthly, 190 books to date, primarily classics. This evening was in its own category and I encourage everyone to read Tomas’s work.
The world-famous (well, among us) Fiction Book Club conference called last night with Roy Kesey pummeling him with questions about his stunning novella, Nothing in the World. That the book won a literary award (Bullfight Little Book Prize) is little surprise when you read it; that it's short means you can prove me right in one long sitting.
Here's how we did it: First the book club members met to talk as we typically do, discussing what we liked, what we wondered about, and, but not in this case, what we didn't like. Our overall opinion of the book was unanimous: everyone loved it.
This story about the war that consumed most of the Balkans during the 1990s is hair-raising, horrific, mythic, and supremely well written. Gorgeous. Such exquisite language that one of our members read out a section that he called poetry.
About an hour later, Roy called us from Lima, Peru, where he and his family are living. (His wife, Lu, is a Peruvian diplomat.) Each person did a self-introduction while I snapped pictures and emailed them to Roy. Then we fired questions at him: Why did he write this book? How much time transpired from the beginning of the story to the end? How did he go about writing it? What was the meaning of a particular character? How did the book come to be published? What role did the vignettes play in the story? Why did he choose the title? And all kinds of other intrusive-none-of-our-business queries whose answers I'm not going to give away in hopes that you'll ask them yourselves.
Graciously, with humor and diffidence, Roy explained everything, including his telling us that in fact some of the prose began as poetry, that he had visited the area both before and during the war, that he knew some of the stories, variously, first, second, and third hand, and that it took much courage (he didn't use the word) to throw out some 40,000 words that were once in the draft.
It was a great evening and I recommend that you do the same with your book club. Read this book, invite Roy to attend by conference call, and you'll have an evening you never forget.
And, thanks, Roy. We'll be delighted to host you when you come to Boston on your next book tour.
Almost forgot! How do I know Roy? Zoetrope, of course. One aspect of being part of the Zoe writer community is critiquing the work of other writers. (In exchange for every five stories you critique, you can submit one of your own.) I was in the business of amassing critiques when Roy posted a story, which I loved--and wrote many notes back to him about, suggesting this that and the other thing. What I remember most was my feeling after reading it - that he must have written it, then fallen over in an exhausted heap. Such energy in his writing. And now having read more of his work, such range. We decided to read this book at the suggestion of our December '09 author-guest, Ron Currie Jr., who calls Roy "the best unknown writer in America." Not for long, both Ron and I wager.
He's funny, his thinking original, his second book unlike anything you've ever read. "How old is this guy?" one friend asked when he finished reading the book. It's hard to believe that someone with such insight and such an unblinking eye toward human foibles is only 34.
Our Fiction Book Club spent last evening with Ron Currie Jr. to talk about his award winning second book, Everything Matters! I've already raved about the book and written aplenty about my admiration for Ron's work. Just read it - and if you're lucky, he'll come to your book club too.
In the pocket of secrets that fill our lives, threads fray. While most sew them right up, an unusual few take certain strands and pull them in just the right way that they make what is normally private more public.
Such was the great luck of the Fiction Book Club yesterday when Roland Merullo visited us. That we were fortunate enough to have a few moments with Amanda, wife of, and Alexandra and Juliana, daughters of, was its own gift.
In preparation for our special Saturday session, we read Breakfast with Buddha, the novel of Roland's that's been nominated for the Dublin International Literary Award (and which he's discussing today as the book chosen for its first "Wayland Reads" program). As a bonus book, we also agreed to read his latest, Fidel's Last Days, which most in the group also read and loved.
We asked a lot of questions: Why did he write the book? How did he write it? Does he plot out his novels in advance? Why did the characters do this or that? When did he start writing? What did he do before he wrote and/or when he was waiting for his books to be published? What is he working on now? What in Buddha is real, what imagined?
While I could do a very long post now, jotting down all that Roland said, commenting on it and suchnot, instead I'm just going to report what everyone agreed:
"This is the best book club we've ever had."
And how the two-and-a-half hours with Roland affected us:
It was another four hours before everyone left, during which time we had perhaps our most profound conversation as a group about where we are in our lives and where we're thinking of going.
I doubt that was Roland's intention as he is hardly a person who tries to get others to do things or influence them in ways that seem right to him.
What caused this to happen, I think, is his openness, his "straightforward" way, as one book club member said.
I count myself as extremely fortunate to have met Roland when I did, at a point in my writing career when I needed someone to stand behind me and point in different directions, which is precisely what he's done. Unexpected has been his unstinting generosity, which I've been the beneficiary of in so many ways, including his taking time yesterday to sit with our book club and open us further to possibilities.
Two of Boston’s great literati (and my friends, which makes them even greater, natch) team up this Thursday night for readings in the Newtonville Books series. Askold Melnyczuk will read from his new novel, The House of Widows, Sven Birkerts from his new work, The Art of Time in Memoir, both published by the powerful little Graywolf Press.
The two mens’ lives intersect most notably through Agni, the literary magazine now published at Boston University. Askold, director of the writing program at University of Massachusetts/Boston and publisher with Alex Johnson of Arrowsmith Books, founded the magazine in 1972 while a young student at Antioch College; Sven, recently named director of the Bennington graduate writing program, has been its editor since 2003.
See you there: 7 PM, Thursday, March 20, Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut Street, Newtonville, Mass.
Photo: Askold reading from Ambassador of the Dead, Fiction Book Club, Feb 15, 2005, my house
