Maybe Books Prefer Disorder
Valeria Luiselli, trans. Christina McSweeney, Sidewalks
Granta Books, 208pp, 12.99, ISBN 9781847085191
reviewed by Ben Millson
Not quite a book about walking, not quite a book about writing, Sidewalks is a collection of essays about living as a free-thinking individual in a world of cities bridged by technology. In a little over one hundred pages the peripatetic Luiselli covers Mexico City, Venice and New York - amongst others - with a quick eye and a scholar’s heart. She is a keen excavator and expositor; the history of places, people, words and ideas are deftly woven together in brief tapestries of a life lived around the world. Luiselli flits back and forth: often wearing her conversation lightly, at times her ideas tumble and the language of their expression thickens, suffocating the easy artfulness of our imagined conversation.
Luiselli possesses a careful and assiduous literariness, a worry about writing, about creating which tempers her creative impulses into something rich and sad-eyed. Tucking a picture torn from a newspaper into a journal she worries that her notebooks are destined to be ‘a disorganised collage and never a catalogue of marvels’. These essays provide no foundation for such a worry: structurally sparse, they move carefully and quickly around various foci; often pairs of thoughts which twine together to give a physical foundation for an intellectual excavation. ‘Alternative Routes’ - taking the structure which is echoed throughout the collection - marries a cycle in the rain to a bookshop with an exploration of the antecedents of the Portuguese word saudade, a word ‘which retains some form of pain in the gliding movement between its first vowels, brings to mind those things which are at once beautiful and a little sad: boats, willows, saurian lizards, a bough’.
Her declaration, then, that ‘there is nothing to write about’ does not feel like a true admission; the feeling derived from this collection is rather that there is nothing new to write about, and no new form to write in. Instead, Luiselli must make do with what has been used before; the modes of experience and the structure of writing are mimeographs of historical literariness. Luiselli acknowledges the rich path she treads as she goes: sometimes she walks like Benjamin walked, sometimes she looks like Poe looked. Her experience is couched in the experience she knows has come before it, and the techniques of their representation.
In ‘Manifesto à Velo’, the contention is raised that the city is best traversed on a bicycle, because ‘skimming along on two wheels, the rider finds just the right pace for observing the city and being at once its accomplice and its witness’. Within the context and style of the essay this statement is enough - it is convincing and honest - but weighted down by the historiography of the genre, Luiselli qualifies her own truth: ’the person suspended over two wheels, a meter above the ground, can see things as if through the lens of a movie camera: he can linger on minutiae and pass over what is unnecessary’. Cycling abruptly moves away from its conception as the mobile iteration of the thirsty gaze of the flaneur and becomes instead a Vertovian viewing, mechanised and dismissive. It is an image which does not fit with what has come before, but feels rather like a cultural rubber-stamp, tacked on to legitimise a young writer’s incursion into the country of cultural monoliths.
Sidewalks fares best when it steps away from those monoliths and looks around, instead of up. Luiselli has a talent for stepping out the front door and taking the reader with her. She evokes spaces with more comfort than she does ideas, and consequently her best essays and best ideas are built not from structures of pure thought but from buildings; graveyards; screens; windows. Whereas ‘Stuttering Cities’ is an anaemic reflection on having language, essays with a more physical basis such as ‘Relingos: The Cartography of Empty Spaces’ are rich in the language of both experience and ideas. Luiselli notices the empty spaces clustered around the edge of things - corners of paving cut adrift by the widening of a road, triangular plazas marooned by the changing shapes of the city - patches of purposeless land in places where land is invaluable, and uses them as the foundations for a written architecture which is both descriptive and philosophical.
There is an easy, conversational scholarship to the essays at points like this; the name relingos comes from a group of architects, and a succinct collection of historical relingos pepper the essay, accompanied by elegant relations of Bathesian narratives on architecture and smartly scripted textual inversions. Luiselli lists the ways a book can be read like a city: ‘Tomàs Segovia: a boulevard, a breath of air; Roberto Bolaño: a rooftop terrace [...] Walter Benjamin: a one-way street walked down against the flow.’ This warm understanding of other writers is at the core of the intermittent excellence of this collection: when the writing finds itself browsing amongst the giants of literary history rather than seeking to mount them, Luiselli’s language flows in gentle poetry. I can think of no better description of Benjamin than ‘a one-way street walked down against the flow’.
The last is a knowing nod, an appreciation of the structural debt inherent in Sidewalks’ subdivided nature; though that debt exists, Luiselli averts her eyes from may be called - for want of a better phrase - the aphoristic didacticism of the Frankfurt School. Despite the weight of that historical imperative felt so strongly in the mid-Twentieth Century, Luiselli has written her own book - a book which is always conscious of that past desperation to write. This relaxed and self-aware engagement with culture and the act of writing creates a space for Luiselli’s personality: if ‘a relingo - an emptiness, an absence - is a sort of depository for possibilities, a place that can be seized by the imagination and inhabited by our phantom-follies,’ then Sidewalks comes to life when that empty space allows the ‘I’ to slip through and expand into expressions of memory and uncompromised thought.
Those thoughts come in bubbles, shaped by the cities and spaces that the writer loves. Each brief essay is broken down into sub-sections and sub-thoughts, itinerant mental wanderings signposted by Luiselli’s movement through the city. These are in turn peppered with the sub-literary readings of the city as a series of incidental headings: signposts (‘No dogs; Pedestrian Crossing; Go’); directions (‘Left again at Jalapa’); gravestones (‘Ezra Pound (1885-1972)’). It is a book by someone who is driven to roam, and who has the fortune in doing so to come across the secret 'bureaucratic paradises' of Venice, and the sensitivity to cry whenever her aircraft touches down in Mexico City; ’a simple, moist tribute to landing on that great desert lake’. As such, it is also a book that will drive its reader to roam - through one’s own flat or house in search of the context of a hinted-at or half-remembered quotation Luiselli alludes to - and through one’s own city, to a bookshop, to a library, to look for an empty space.
Luiselli possesses a careful and assiduous literariness, a worry about writing, about creating which tempers her creative impulses into something rich and sad-eyed. Tucking a picture torn from a newspaper into a journal she worries that her notebooks are destined to be ‘a disorganised collage and never a catalogue of marvels’. These essays provide no foundation for such a worry: structurally sparse, they move carefully and quickly around various foci; often pairs of thoughts which twine together to give a physical foundation for an intellectual excavation. ‘Alternative Routes’ - taking the structure which is echoed throughout the collection - marries a cycle in the rain to a bookshop with an exploration of the antecedents of the Portuguese word saudade, a word ‘which retains some form of pain in the gliding movement between its first vowels, brings to mind those things which are at once beautiful and a little sad: boats, willows, saurian lizards, a bough’.
Her declaration, then, that ‘there is nothing to write about’ does not feel like a true admission; the feeling derived from this collection is rather that there is nothing new to write about, and no new form to write in. Instead, Luiselli must make do with what has been used before; the modes of experience and the structure of writing are mimeographs of historical literariness. Luiselli acknowledges the rich path she treads as she goes: sometimes she walks like Benjamin walked, sometimes she looks like Poe looked. Her experience is couched in the experience she knows has come before it, and the techniques of their representation.
In ‘Manifesto à Velo’, the contention is raised that the city is best traversed on a bicycle, because ‘skimming along on two wheels, the rider finds just the right pace for observing the city and being at once its accomplice and its witness’. Within the context and style of the essay this statement is enough - it is convincing and honest - but weighted down by the historiography of the genre, Luiselli qualifies her own truth: ’the person suspended over two wheels, a meter above the ground, can see things as if through the lens of a movie camera: he can linger on minutiae and pass over what is unnecessary’. Cycling abruptly moves away from its conception as the mobile iteration of the thirsty gaze of the flaneur and becomes instead a Vertovian viewing, mechanised and dismissive. It is an image which does not fit with what has come before, but feels rather like a cultural rubber-stamp, tacked on to legitimise a young writer’s incursion into the country of cultural monoliths.
Sidewalks fares best when it steps away from those monoliths and looks around, instead of up. Luiselli has a talent for stepping out the front door and taking the reader with her. She evokes spaces with more comfort than she does ideas, and consequently her best essays and best ideas are built not from structures of pure thought but from buildings; graveyards; screens; windows. Whereas ‘Stuttering Cities’ is an anaemic reflection on having language, essays with a more physical basis such as ‘Relingos: The Cartography of Empty Spaces’ are rich in the language of both experience and ideas. Luiselli notices the empty spaces clustered around the edge of things - corners of paving cut adrift by the widening of a road, triangular plazas marooned by the changing shapes of the city - patches of purposeless land in places where land is invaluable, and uses them as the foundations for a written architecture which is both descriptive and philosophical.
There is an easy, conversational scholarship to the essays at points like this; the name relingos comes from a group of architects, and a succinct collection of historical relingos pepper the essay, accompanied by elegant relations of Bathesian narratives on architecture and smartly scripted textual inversions. Luiselli lists the ways a book can be read like a city: ‘Tomàs Segovia: a boulevard, a breath of air; Roberto Bolaño: a rooftop terrace [...] Walter Benjamin: a one-way street walked down against the flow.’ This warm understanding of other writers is at the core of the intermittent excellence of this collection: when the writing finds itself browsing amongst the giants of literary history rather than seeking to mount them, Luiselli’s language flows in gentle poetry. I can think of no better description of Benjamin than ‘a one-way street walked down against the flow’.
The last is a knowing nod, an appreciation of the structural debt inherent in Sidewalks’ subdivided nature; though that debt exists, Luiselli averts her eyes from may be called - for want of a better phrase - the aphoristic didacticism of the Frankfurt School. Despite the weight of that historical imperative felt so strongly in the mid-Twentieth Century, Luiselli has written her own book - a book which is always conscious of that past desperation to write. This relaxed and self-aware engagement with culture and the act of writing creates a space for Luiselli’s personality: if ‘a relingo - an emptiness, an absence - is a sort of depository for possibilities, a place that can be seized by the imagination and inhabited by our phantom-follies,’ then Sidewalks comes to life when that empty space allows the ‘I’ to slip through and expand into expressions of memory and uncompromised thought.
Those thoughts come in bubbles, shaped by the cities and spaces that the writer loves. Each brief essay is broken down into sub-sections and sub-thoughts, itinerant mental wanderings signposted by Luiselli’s movement through the city. These are in turn peppered with the sub-literary readings of the city as a series of incidental headings: signposts (‘No dogs; Pedestrian Crossing; Go’); directions (‘Left again at Jalapa’); gravestones (‘Ezra Pound (1885-1972)’). It is a book by someone who is driven to roam, and who has the fortune in doing so to come across the secret 'bureaucratic paradises' of Venice, and the sensitivity to cry whenever her aircraft touches down in Mexico City; ’a simple, moist tribute to landing on that great desert lake’. As such, it is also a book that will drive its reader to roam - through one’s own flat or house in search of the context of a hinted-at or half-remembered quotation Luiselli alludes to - and through one’s own city, to a bookshop, to a library, to look for an empty space.