What are we supposed to do with that?
Miquel de Palol, trans. Adrian Nathan West, The Garden of Seven Twilights
Dalkey Archive Press, 888pp, £19.99, ISBN 9781628974515
reviewed by Josh Billings
To someone raised on a diet of 19th and 20th-century fiction, Miquel de Palol’s The Garden of Seven Twilights reads like a very strange novel. In many ways, it does not read like a novel at all. A huge part of this has to do with its structure. Whereas most contemporary novels move like trains, travelling from a predictable point A to a prearranged, if hopefully satisfying point B, de Palol’s book seems to expand in all directions at once, like a fleet of getaway cars. The experience of following its zigzag can be draining but also rewarding; for by forgoing the psychological realism that became the ascendant form of the novel in the 19th century, de Palol regains some of the storytelling virtues that preceded this form. His book is immediate and, in certain points, very uncertain-feeling; and in this way, the tradition that The Garden of Seven Twilights resembles is really not ‘the novel’ at all, but the older tradition of story cycles exemplified by Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio’s Decameron.
Such comparisons may seem gratuitous until we remember how relevant this last book felt in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, not just for its description of plague-ravaged Europe, but for its proof that civilisation could survive the end of the world, or at least something that appeared to be the end to the people living through it. The Garden of Seven Twilights begins from a similar place of uncertainty about the future of humanity, or at least humanism — and in this way we might chock up the fact that it has been successfully translated into English only now, over thirty years after its original publication in Catalan, to the kind of literary-historical kismet that publishers wrack their brains to manufacture, but almost never achieve.
Born out of the chaotic and liberated atmosphere of 1980s Spain, The Garden of the Seven Twilights opens with an explicitly Boccaccian setup. A handful of well-heeled technocrats take shelter from a hypothetical future world war in a remote mountain residence outside of Barcelona, where they spend the next seven days telling one another stories that initially appear to be casual and disconnected, but which coalesce over the course of the narrative around a handful of repeating figures. Eventually, what began as a thematic anthology about war and late capitalism becomes a whodunit along the lines of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, with the narrator of the frame story — a young man whose origins are kept studiously secret until the end of the book — turning out to be a key, not only to the other guests’ fates, but to the war raging on around them as well. (Divulging this can only be considered a spoiler if you ignore the fact that the narrator’s importance is so heavily signalled from the beginning of the book that its revelation at the end feels predictable and vaguely ironic, like a superhero finally donning his signature outfit.)
Condensing a 900-page book into a few sentences is of course going to leave a lot out, but saying this about The Garden of Seven Twilights is a little like criticizing someone’s description of a rollercoaster ride because they didn’t talk enough about the wait in line. Besides, the main pleasure of De Palol’s book is not the plot, which is less predictable than mythic, in the way that the plot of, for example, The Searchers is, or The Road is. It’s a structure — a framing device designed to make us feel like all of these smaller stories are adding up to something rewarding, in the same way that the existence of a pension plan might allow the worker in an Amazon warehouse to feel like the indignities of their job are going to eventually translate into an existence that is itself dignified. That such a pay-off may in fact not be waiting for either novel readers or hypothetical wage-monkeys is one of the ironies that haunts the nesting-doll hijinks of the book, which for all its immediate pleasures, does seem to suggest an implicit, and sinister, connection between a story’s desire to propel its reader forward, and late capitalism’s need to keep its machinery moving at any cost.
I say implicit, but the truth is that the suggestion of an emptiness lurking underneath the activity of The Garden of Seven Twilights is less implied than programmed into the actual experience of reading the book. This isn’t because De Palol is a bad storyteller; on the contrary, his narration is filled with exactly the kind of deft, well-executed plot twists and reversals that engage our readerly interest on a limbic level, like a hook in a pop song. Propelled by such a cascade of small pleasures, the story of The Garden of Seven Twilights subsumes our attention, smothering us under its non-stop assault of virtuosic developments – and in this way, its hypnotic assault resembles less your traditional beach read than of Mandelshtam’s description of The Divine Comedy as an airplane that somehow constructs another airplane out of itself mid-flight, which then launches to construct another airplane, and so on and so on. The effect is riveting, but there is a virtuosic and overworked element to it too. In many places, the sheer number of strands becomes too much to follow, leading to a passivity that makes the book feel like a car that has been developed with every possible amenity in mind except for the location of the driver’s seat.
It is this automatic, sleepwalking dimension of The Garden of Seven Twilights that makes the book feel less like a critique of storyness – that is, of the feeling (which so many great novels and multinational ad campaigns give us) that we are passengers in a vehicle moving irresistibly towards some distant, but oh-so-promising light — than like an unwitting and often tedious symptom of it. I do not want to under-stress the tedium. It begins, like a head cold, with a sort of itchy dread, before blossoming into the kind of full-body malaise that makes previously-delicious food look inedible. Its continuing wellspring is not the structure of the book so much as the prose itself, which is not inept so much as self-consciously serviceable. As a medium, it is clearly designed to provide a transparent broth in which the story can develop without interruption or distraction, which is not inherently misguided, of course, but which gives the writing a perfunctory and even vaguely pharmaceutical smell, like pudding hiding crushed pills. The sentences tumble past as if it they were obstacles that we are supposed to hurdle, rather than way stations we are meant to linger over; and this in turn adds up, over the course of so much repetition, to a flattening that makes the words themselves feel totally disposable — as if the actual writing of the book were a task that De Palol (who is himself a highly regarded poet) had farmed out to an A.I. chatbot, or maybe an extremely mercenary Oulipean.
I admit, by the time I got to the middle chunk of The Garden of Seven Twilights, I was convinced some combination of these entities was subjecting me to a critique of the reading experience as exhaustive as The Big Sleep. But then, if I want to be exhausted, why not just go to a baseball game? All around us the huge stories are winding down, winding up, looking transparent as the miracle friezes no doubt had begun to appear to Boccaccio. The sheer fatigue of such endless rehearsal is palpable in the very texture of the book, which eventually comes to feel less snappy than limp and unenergised by its material. Understandably, too; for whereas the stories in the Decameron dealt with their age’s yawning disconnect between art and life by describing things — sex, for example — that had never made it into the official hagiographies, The Garden of Seven Twilights gives us . . . a multigenerational epic about investment bankers. Perhaps fittingly, then, the sense that we take away from its updating of the classic arrangement is not that storytelling is rejuvenating, but that it is past rejuvenation, like the light from a star that burnt out several centuries ago but is only now reaching our solar system.
It’s hard not to feel somewhat strange saying this about a book that clearly succeeds at everything it attempts — but then that’s the problem with The Garden of the Seven Twilights: its success, which is blanketing and inarguable. The word that comes to mind, again, is ‘feat’, which for the purposes of this review we might define as an attempt to replace the qualitative and untrustworthy components of art with more qualitative and systematic ones. Attractive as it can be, there is something inherently obtuse about this attempt. It’s like trying to become a professional basketball player by doing a thousand sit-ups a day, or to be good person by standing on a pillar in the middle of the desert for nine months: we can see and even respect the point, while at the same time suspecting that maybe the whole thing stems, not from an abundance of sincerity, but from an indomitable rejection of the world as it is. Nevertheless, it would take a very blinkered view of the history of art not to admit that such feats have a critical place in it. Look at Watt, for example, or A Table of Green Fields, or the moment in Fitzcarraldo when the density of the beached riverboat bends the very genre of genres of ‘documentary’ or ‘feature film’ into a kind of third space, and we feel ourselves, impossibly, sinking into the very same mud. These are not Criss Angel drowning himself on live television — or at least, they are not just that. They are heroic attempts to move beyond what already exists, in a way that, though it may not always succeed in and of itself, has over and over again opened a path for future, more subtilised, and successful attempts.
De Palol’s book is a trailblazing one in this vein, which is what makes its failure as a work of art (as opposed to its success as a feat) so important. It’s as if, after going on a voyage to some distant solar system, a shuttle had returned to earth carrying nothing more than a hold full of inert space rocks — ‘To the telling of stories there is no end. . .’, mutter the astronauts as they disembark, but why couldn’t the same proof have been made just as definitively by a seven page Borges story? So, every now and then while reading The Garden of Seven Twilights, I was reminded of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished The Pale King: another book that misunderstands fatally the deal that modernism struck with mimeses, by which I mean the understanding that formal experimentation negotiated in the 20th century between the thing represented and the act of representation itself. You cannot write a boring book about boredom (as Virginia Wolf understood), or a tedious book about tedium (Flaubert), or a meaningless book about the meaninglessness of modern life (Joyce). De Palol, who is clearly a genius, managed (no doubt because of his genius) to write a page-turner whose point is pointlessness. But what are we supposed to do with that?
One way to answer this riddle is to see The Garden of Seven Twilights less as a novel per se than an audacious work of literary criticism — one whose pretensions as text turn out to be surprisingly useful as commentary, like a secret map of literature that we’ve been using this whole time as a napkin. Indeed, this sense of continuity with a larger project is one of the most satisfying things about the novel; for despite its devotion to Crichtonesque industrial intrigues, The Garden of Seven Twilights really does feel like it is participating in a more momentous, and long-ranging cultural ambition. It is a book that, with its echoes and conscious posturing, clearly sees itself as existing towards the end of something — whether that something is ‘the novel’, or ‘humanism’, or even ‘Western Civilisation’ — and in this way one of the most interesting things about its plot is the way that it both ends and consciously declines ending, choosing instead to open outwards, into a renewal of promise and activity.
The war is over (or looks like it is going to be over), the hero seizes his destiny (or seems poised to seize it) . . . and yet, here again, the point seems to be less that everything’s been wrapped up than that the process of wrapping continues. The real finis is still in the future, meaning somewhere out beyond the novel’s set formal boundaries, which is why we have to keep on unravelling our Shaherezadean plot, subdividing the last minutes before the dawn into smaller and smaller portions.
Will it ever get here? On this point, The Garden of Seven Twilights remains studiously silent, although of course we can draw our own conclusions from what we have already read. Six-hundred years after The Decameron, human beings are still telling stories to keep out the cold — but then maybe this is the difference between celebrating stories in Boccaccio’s era, when reality seemed on the verge of swamping humanity into nonexistence, and our own, when the humanist urge, at least as originally constituted, has turned out to be working hand in glove with the very destruction that it is trying to survive. We tell ourselves stories in order to survive the stories that we have told ourselves in order to survive. But after 900 pages who can help but ask the question: how long, exactly, are we supposed to keep this up?
Such comparisons may seem gratuitous until we remember how relevant this last book felt in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, not just for its description of plague-ravaged Europe, but for its proof that civilisation could survive the end of the world, or at least something that appeared to be the end to the people living through it. The Garden of Seven Twilights begins from a similar place of uncertainty about the future of humanity, or at least humanism — and in this way we might chock up the fact that it has been successfully translated into English only now, over thirty years after its original publication in Catalan, to the kind of literary-historical kismet that publishers wrack their brains to manufacture, but almost never achieve.
Born out of the chaotic and liberated atmosphere of 1980s Spain, The Garden of the Seven Twilights opens with an explicitly Boccaccian setup. A handful of well-heeled technocrats take shelter from a hypothetical future world war in a remote mountain residence outside of Barcelona, where they spend the next seven days telling one another stories that initially appear to be casual and disconnected, but which coalesce over the course of the narrative around a handful of repeating figures. Eventually, what began as a thematic anthology about war and late capitalism becomes a whodunit along the lines of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, with the narrator of the frame story — a young man whose origins are kept studiously secret until the end of the book — turning out to be a key, not only to the other guests’ fates, but to the war raging on around them as well. (Divulging this can only be considered a spoiler if you ignore the fact that the narrator’s importance is so heavily signalled from the beginning of the book that its revelation at the end feels predictable and vaguely ironic, like a superhero finally donning his signature outfit.)
Condensing a 900-page book into a few sentences is of course going to leave a lot out, but saying this about The Garden of Seven Twilights is a little like criticizing someone’s description of a rollercoaster ride because they didn’t talk enough about the wait in line. Besides, the main pleasure of De Palol’s book is not the plot, which is less predictable than mythic, in the way that the plot of, for example, The Searchers is, or The Road is. It’s a structure — a framing device designed to make us feel like all of these smaller stories are adding up to something rewarding, in the same way that the existence of a pension plan might allow the worker in an Amazon warehouse to feel like the indignities of their job are going to eventually translate into an existence that is itself dignified. That such a pay-off may in fact not be waiting for either novel readers or hypothetical wage-monkeys is one of the ironies that haunts the nesting-doll hijinks of the book, which for all its immediate pleasures, does seem to suggest an implicit, and sinister, connection between a story’s desire to propel its reader forward, and late capitalism’s need to keep its machinery moving at any cost.
I say implicit, but the truth is that the suggestion of an emptiness lurking underneath the activity of The Garden of Seven Twilights is less implied than programmed into the actual experience of reading the book. This isn’t because De Palol is a bad storyteller; on the contrary, his narration is filled with exactly the kind of deft, well-executed plot twists and reversals that engage our readerly interest on a limbic level, like a hook in a pop song. Propelled by such a cascade of small pleasures, the story of The Garden of Seven Twilights subsumes our attention, smothering us under its non-stop assault of virtuosic developments – and in this way, its hypnotic assault resembles less your traditional beach read than of Mandelshtam’s description of The Divine Comedy as an airplane that somehow constructs another airplane out of itself mid-flight, which then launches to construct another airplane, and so on and so on. The effect is riveting, but there is a virtuosic and overworked element to it too. In many places, the sheer number of strands becomes too much to follow, leading to a passivity that makes the book feel like a car that has been developed with every possible amenity in mind except for the location of the driver’s seat.
It is this automatic, sleepwalking dimension of The Garden of Seven Twilights that makes the book feel less like a critique of storyness – that is, of the feeling (which so many great novels and multinational ad campaigns give us) that we are passengers in a vehicle moving irresistibly towards some distant, but oh-so-promising light — than like an unwitting and often tedious symptom of it. I do not want to under-stress the tedium. It begins, like a head cold, with a sort of itchy dread, before blossoming into the kind of full-body malaise that makes previously-delicious food look inedible. Its continuing wellspring is not the structure of the book so much as the prose itself, which is not inept so much as self-consciously serviceable. As a medium, it is clearly designed to provide a transparent broth in which the story can develop without interruption or distraction, which is not inherently misguided, of course, but which gives the writing a perfunctory and even vaguely pharmaceutical smell, like pudding hiding crushed pills. The sentences tumble past as if it they were obstacles that we are supposed to hurdle, rather than way stations we are meant to linger over; and this in turn adds up, over the course of so much repetition, to a flattening that makes the words themselves feel totally disposable — as if the actual writing of the book were a task that De Palol (who is himself a highly regarded poet) had farmed out to an A.I. chatbot, or maybe an extremely mercenary Oulipean.
I admit, by the time I got to the middle chunk of The Garden of Seven Twilights, I was convinced some combination of these entities was subjecting me to a critique of the reading experience as exhaustive as The Big Sleep. But then, if I want to be exhausted, why not just go to a baseball game? All around us the huge stories are winding down, winding up, looking transparent as the miracle friezes no doubt had begun to appear to Boccaccio. The sheer fatigue of such endless rehearsal is palpable in the very texture of the book, which eventually comes to feel less snappy than limp and unenergised by its material. Understandably, too; for whereas the stories in the Decameron dealt with their age’s yawning disconnect between art and life by describing things — sex, for example — that had never made it into the official hagiographies, The Garden of Seven Twilights gives us . . . a multigenerational epic about investment bankers. Perhaps fittingly, then, the sense that we take away from its updating of the classic arrangement is not that storytelling is rejuvenating, but that it is past rejuvenation, like the light from a star that burnt out several centuries ago but is only now reaching our solar system.
It’s hard not to feel somewhat strange saying this about a book that clearly succeeds at everything it attempts — but then that’s the problem with The Garden of the Seven Twilights: its success, which is blanketing and inarguable. The word that comes to mind, again, is ‘feat’, which for the purposes of this review we might define as an attempt to replace the qualitative and untrustworthy components of art with more qualitative and systematic ones. Attractive as it can be, there is something inherently obtuse about this attempt. It’s like trying to become a professional basketball player by doing a thousand sit-ups a day, or to be good person by standing on a pillar in the middle of the desert for nine months: we can see and even respect the point, while at the same time suspecting that maybe the whole thing stems, not from an abundance of sincerity, but from an indomitable rejection of the world as it is. Nevertheless, it would take a very blinkered view of the history of art not to admit that such feats have a critical place in it. Look at Watt, for example, or A Table of Green Fields, or the moment in Fitzcarraldo when the density of the beached riverboat bends the very genre of genres of ‘documentary’ or ‘feature film’ into a kind of third space, and we feel ourselves, impossibly, sinking into the very same mud. These are not Criss Angel drowning himself on live television — or at least, they are not just that. They are heroic attempts to move beyond what already exists, in a way that, though it may not always succeed in and of itself, has over and over again opened a path for future, more subtilised, and successful attempts.
De Palol’s book is a trailblazing one in this vein, which is what makes its failure as a work of art (as opposed to its success as a feat) so important. It’s as if, after going on a voyage to some distant solar system, a shuttle had returned to earth carrying nothing more than a hold full of inert space rocks — ‘To the telling of stories there is no end. . .’, mutter the astronauts as they disembark, but why couldn’t the same proof have been made just as definitively by a seven page Borges story? So, every now and then while reading The Garden of Seven Twilights, I was reminded of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished The Pale King: another book that misunderstands fatally the deal that modernism struck with mimeses, by which I mean the understanding that formal experimentation negotiated in the 20th century between the thing represented and the act of representation itself. You cannot write a boring book about boredom (as Virginia Wolf understood), or a tedious book about tedium (Flaubert), or a meaningless book about the meaninglessness of modern life (Joyce). De Palol, who is clearly a genius, managed (no doubt because of his genius) to write a page-turner whose point is pointlessness. But what are we supposed to do with that?
One way to answer this riddle is to see The Garden of Seven Twilights less as a novel per se than an audacious work of literary criticism — one whose pretensions as text turn out to be surprisingly useful as commentary, like a secret map of literature that we’ve been using this whole time as a napkin. Indeed, this sense of continuity with a larger project is one of the most satisfying things about the novel; for despite its devotion to Crichtonesque industrial intrigues, The Garden of Seven Twilights really does feel like it is participating in a more momentous, and long-ranging cultural ambition. It is a book that, with its echoes and conscious posturing, clearly sees itself as existing towards the end of something — whether that something is ‘the novel’, or ‘humanism’, or even ‘Western Civilisation’ — and in this way one of the most interesting things about its plot is the way that it both ends and consciously declines ending, choosing instead to open outwards, into a renewal of promise and activity.
The war is over (or looks like it is going to be over), the hero seizes his destiny (or seems poised to seize it) . . . and yet, here again, the point seems to be less that everything’s been wrapped up than that the process of wrapping continues. The real finis is still in the future, meaning somewhere out beyond the novel’s set formal boundaries, which is why we have to keep on unravelling our Shaherezadean plot, subdividing the last minutes before the dawn into smaller and smaller portions.
Will it ever get here? On this point, The Garden of Seven Twilights remains studiously silent, although of course we can draw our own conclusions from what we have already read. Six-hundred years after The Decameron, human beings are still telling stories to keep out the cold — but then maybe this is the difference between celebrating stories in Boccaccio’s era, when reality seemed on the verge of swamping humanity into nonexistence, and our own, when the humanist urge, at least as originally constituted, has turned out to be working hand in glove with the very destruction that it is trying to survive. We tell ourselves stories in order to survive the stories that we have told ourselves in order to survive. But after 900 pages who can help but ask the question: how long, exactly, are we supposed to keep this up?