By the first page of this novel you know exactly who this narrator is. “The first phase of my research involved waking up weekday mornings in a barely furnished attic apartment, the first apartment I’d looked at after arriving in Madrid, or letting myself be woken by the noise from La Plaza Santa Ana, failing to assimilate the noise fully into my dream, then putting on the rusty stovetop espresso machine and rolling a spliff while I waited the coffee…. Next my project required dropping myself back through the skylight, shitting, taking a shower, my white pills, and getting dressed. Then I’d find my bag, which contained a bilingual edition of Lorca’s Collected Poems, my two notebooks, a pocket dictionary, John Ashbery’s Selected Poems, drugs, and leave for the Prado.” This type of self-styled creative is well worn, but still worth getting into the head of when portrayed convincingly. Soon, he is pondering art. “I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music “changed their life,” especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change…. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf.” The narrator, Adam, is living in Madrid on a Fulbright Fellowship, supposedly researching a historical epic on the Spanish Civil War to be written in verse. He spends much of his time scoring hash from African illegal immigrants, flirting with women, and making fun of the American tourists (in his own head). He can speak rudimentary Spanish, but in his struggle to learn it better he alternates between false confidence and hopelessness. “My plan had been to teach myself Spanish by reading masterworks of Spanish literature and I had fantasized about the nature and effect of a Spanish thus learned, how its archaic flavor and formally heightened rhetoric would collide with the mundanities of daily life, giving the impression less of someone from a foreign country than someone from a foreign time.” Often, his struggle with language generates his most beautiful thoughts. “The song was Portugese, not Spanish; I experienced the slow shading of one language into another, a powerful effect only my ignorance of both enabled.” Adam is a published poet and he is always trying to measure up to other writers, both past and present. “I forced myself to listen as if the poem were unpredictable and profound, as if that were given somehow, and any failure to be compelled would be exclusively my own…. I just smiled slightly in a way intended to communicate that my own compliment had been graciousness and that I in fact believed his writing constituted a new low for his or any language, his or any art.” Adam is immensely concerned with appearances, his and others, and, so, often puts on a pose. “I didn’t know how to compose my face, if indifference tinged with vague disdain was still the right expression. If I could have smiled Teresa’s inscrutable smile, I would have.” However, through it all, his self-importance is saved by his slightly biting humor. “The prospect of being a writer in residence in a modern palace frequented by the beautiful was not without its allure, however exhausting it would be for my face.”
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