Paradiso

What a wild, untamed creature have we here! It shifts through light and dark, wakefulness and sleep, mundane and hallucinatory in an unabashed orgy of oneiric poetic prose. An example: "The August dry spell made sleep feverish. A terrible nightmare: palm leaves carried off by the high tide; at the edge of the water, we stretch out our hands to reach the leaves but a gust of wind carries them away on the waves. We wake up, gasping with a shout. The cat scratches the leaves and shreds them in the dust of the doorways."; and this selection is very mild, actually, compared with a great deal of the prose, truly phantasmagoric in parts and undulating with rich sexual imagery.The reader being thus apprised, the plot, such as it is, is a fairly straightforward Bildungsroman of Jose Cemi. This novel has been compared to many other works, and its author to many other writers. But the writer to whom Lima bears the most resemblance is unquestionably Joyce; the style is comparable to that of Ulysses infused with animism, mysticism and mythomania. But the work it won't fail to remind the well-read reader of the most is Joyce's A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man. The friendship between Cemi, Fronesis and Focion and their effusive, aporetic debates at law school - which comprise the bulk of the novel - remind one of nothing so much as Joyce's Stephen Daedalus and his exchanges on aesthetics with his friends at Trinity College - except that the disquieting erudition of Cemi and his friends make Stephen and chums appear as babbling lower form lads by comparison. And, like Joyce's hero, Cemi recites his own creed of the artist-hero at the perihelion of his college days:"Don't reject danger and always try what is most difficult. There's a danger that confronts us in the form of substitution, there's also a danger that sick people seek out, a sterile danger, the danger without epiphany. But when a man throughout his days has tested what is most difficult, he knows that he has lived in danger, and even though its existence has been silent, even though the succession of its waves has been peaceful, he knows that a day has been assigned to him in which he will be transfigured, and he will not see the fish inside the current but the fish in the starry basket of eternity."I have only touched the tip of the iceberg here. I should have to delve into everything from Plotinus to Proust to do so - Lima, like Joyce, is not for everyone. I should particularly warn those afraid of dark, poetic sexual imagery - "the entrance of the dark grotto" and such. Thus, bowing to Lima, I shall leave what lies before the reader for him to relate in the words of Focion:"Probably, my dear Cemi, you think my tale is taking on the aspect of a detective thriller, but this little story has everything, you have to follow it through numberless labyrinths until it finally reaches its best and most paradisiacal solution."Yes, you do.

Spanish is my first language, and I'm a serious Lezama reader. I look at and compare the three most important editions of Paradiso each time to look for inconsistencies, richer versions, and so on. The task undertaken by the translator was in itself an epic one, there is no easy paragraph in the whole book, and the translation, even though spanish grammar and english grammar could not be more apart, is a satisfactory one as it keeps the sense intact. So, if you can't read it in the original spanish, go for this version, by all means. Why three stars review then? Because it simplifies the original in its intricacies, and some times plainly censors its original erotic language (meretriz/streetwalker, for instance), Lezama made it a point that the book should be difficult, in its vocabulary, in its syntax, because the experience of the revealing was what it aims for.

Copies in English are just about impossible to find, so this was a real treat.

I was expecting the book to be in spanish. But absolutely one of the best books ever written! Thank you. The price was great.

I was thrown a bit by the first, say, hundred or so pages of this monumental novel. What was going on with the almost unbearably baroque prose style? The author's very sentences, cluttered and clogged with obscure adjectives, parentheical asides, dangling clauses, incomprehensible imagery, seemed to be undermining the flow of his (admittedly digressive, non-linear) plot. I felt like no one was getting anywhere, which, after persevering for a few hundred more pages, I realized was the point. It would be all but impossible to synopsize this novel's central action--if you can even call it action, for, as in Proust and the Great Russian novels (which served as obvious models, it seems safe to say)--there's a lot more conversing than carrying on. There are great, chapters-long debates on homosexuality, philosophy, and politics. Evidently a voracious and learned reader, Lezama Lima seems to have tried to cram all of his knowledge into this, his one and only novel, which, again, is appropriate considering that the book itself seems to be about the totality of human existence (I'm still riddling this one out.) Once I became used to the style and to the rather lenghty debates, I realized that what I was immersed in was a masterpiece, a book as confusing, messy, overwhelming and beautiful as life itself. I can't say that every reader will warm to Paradiso--it is hard going from start to glorious finish--but I do believe that the book deserves a crtical reevaluation. Let's put it alongside not only Gabriel Garcia Maquez and Carlos Fuentes, but also Joyce, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Proust and see where it stands. I have the feeling it might be one of the more important books of the last century.

A masterpiece, beautifully translated. Accept that you will be confused or bewildered at times. Lima is aiming for "understanding beyond reason", so just let him take you wherever he wants to go.