1. Pedro Páramo is the only novel Juan Rulfo wrote and yet it caused much envy, inspiration and influence on other important novelists of the 20th century, most notably Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The narrator here is Juan Preciado who went to Comala to find his father, Pedro Páramo; this was the last request of his mother before she died.

In the place where his mother grew up before she left his father, Juan encountered ghosts of people—Abundio, Eduviges, Pyada, Sixtina—in a now deserted site. Nothing is left of the place, even nature abandoned it. He said: “I hear the dogs howling and I let them howl, because I know there aren’t any dogs here anymore. And on windy days you can hear the wind shaking the leaves, but you already know there aren’t any trees.”

2. At some point in the story (its time is complicatedly non-linear that you cannot really say at what point something happens), Juan also died and was buried. But it didn’t end there because he realized he was still conscious and was actually speaking to corpses (“What happens to these old corpses is that when the dampness reaches them they begin to stir. And then they wake up.”), until he heard the agony of Dona Susanita, supposedly Pedro Páramo’s last (and mostly beloved) wife.

3. Intervening Juan’s narrative are back stories of Pedro Páramo as a child until the death of his other son, the one he reared, Miguel. Pedro Páramo could be Juan Rulfo’s critique of Christianity’s failure to save the bodies (and not just the souls) that suffered the inequalities of life on earth, especially in the face of any oppressive rule. Rulfo had to kill everyone in his novel, for, “you know what they say, that the dead never complain.”

~ After Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo (1955)

1. To be nothing within a closed helmet and armor (for what are they, then? whom to protect?) is Agilulf's predicament, obviously quite unlike all the other soldiers (armored, shielded) who mostly dislike him for being a model one: he "could not know what it was like to shut the eyes, lose consciousness, plunge into emptiness for a few hours and then wake and find oneself the same as before, link up with the threads of one's life again."

Calvino's novel then becomes a meditation on existence and nothingness, on what separates humanity from mere consciousness and voice, which Agilulf both had, aside from a name. But: "World conditions were still confused in the era when this took place. It was not rare then to find names and thoughts and institutions that corresponded to nothing in existence. But at the same time the world was pullulating with objects and capacities and persons who lacked any name or distinguishing mark."

2. But is Agilulf also--despite being disembodied--a man? Although he had "immunity from the shocks and agonies to which people who exist are subject," we would realize in the end that he depended on the very honor of his knighthood; he existed because of the recognition of that honor. When he found out that he probably lived on a lie he disappeared. He did not even have a carcass.

The people he touched became people who searched for his nothingness in order to fill whatever, whoever, is missing in their own lives: Bradamante, a lover; Raimbaud, a confidante; Gurduloo, a master.

3. A romance is often marked by a narrative complicated by some secrets and unknowns, mostly of confused blood relations that is the stuff of our everyday soap operas. "You are the daughter of the King of Scotland and of a peasant woman, I of the queen and of the Sacred Order, we have no blood tie," Torrismund told Sophronia, whom he believed as a child was his mother, later revealed to be her half-sister, before he eventually found out the truth, which, true to the thrust of romances, will make their love for each other possible.

Additionally, only in the fourth chapter would it be revealed that the story is being recounted by one Sister Theodora, who was tasked to do so by the abbess for the health of her soul, as an act of penance, even if she had doubts: that "maybe the time when one wrote with delight was neither a miracle nor grace but a sin, of idolatry, of pride," and that "one may go writing on and on with a soul already lost."

In the beginning she made us believe that she was having difficulties because she was writing about things she failed to experience herself, in the safety of her convent: the battles of war, and "that greatest of mortal follies, the passion of love." In the end it would be told however that she was also one of the characters in her tale, the one named Bradamante, who was running after Agilulf, making everybody convinced that "if a girl has had her fill of every man who exists, her one remaining desire could be for a man who doesn't exist at all."

4. There are moments when Sister Theodora would speak to the book itself, while deciding on what her narrative needs to move forward. Most of the time her novel-writing overwhelms with all the adventures that still need to be written, with all the possibilities looming. In Chapter 9, she tries to make maps, to make use of images, of lines, instead of words, in order to see her tale through; the irony of course is that we as readers do not see those lines and images but are rather confronted, still, with words.

1. After reading two of his novels, The Porcupine (1992) and Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), I'd been quite ambivalent with Julian Barnes. His intellectual register was quite high, but the affective impact was not as much. (It is not the case with Milan Kundera, for example; Kundera’s novels are for me both intellectually and emotionally engaging.) Nonetheless, I couldn’t quite put away Barnes altogether, which also says a lot.

Now that I've read A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, I decided that I loved Barnes more rather than less. His speculation in the accounts on Noah and the great flood is the best first chapter I’ve read in a long time. I am tempted to say that it could be a stand-alone story, but it wouldn't be right. That first chapter (“The Stowaway”) holds the rest of the novel thematically: the indefinite forms of survival, the randomness of our salvation.

2. Novels are the foremost advocates of novel-reading; they are likewise inclined towards commenting on the craft and practice of novel-writing itself. In the “half” chapter of the book (“Parenthesis”), which discourses on love (how I wished Barnes knew of our “mahal kita”), the novelist revealed himself and his thoughts on the ironic virtue of the prose, at the expense of poetry (a lot similar to what Kundera did on the “lyric” in his Life Is Elsewhere):

“All novelists know their art proceeds by indirection. … Still, it’s natural for the novelist sometimes to fret at the obliquities of fiction. … Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’ (when I say ‘I’ you will want to know within a paragraph or two whether I mean Julian Barnes or someone invented; a poet can shimmy between the two, getting credit for both deep feeling and objectivity). Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love—selfish, shitty love—into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.”

~ After Julian Barnes' A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989)

1. I haven’t heard of Luis Fernando Verissimo until I saw his Borges and the Eternal Orangutans. I also haven’t read any Brazilian author before (as far as I could remember), but how could I resist a novel where Borges himself was made a character? In the story, Borges was supposedly working on his The Final Treatise on Mirrors; Borges later commented on “paternity and mirros [as] being equally abominable because both increased the number of men.” Expectedly, there was a reference on Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.

2. A whodunit, the novel is necessarily an existential novel, like most detective novels. The main protagonist is Vogelstein who attended a conference on Edgar Allan Poe in Buenos Aires where he met his idol Borges, and where a murder was committed. “Excessive symmetry is either unnatural and conceals some human thought behind it, or else supernatural and conceals some mystery,” Borges said while musing on their clues.

3. The novel is also a satire of critics and writers, and on their obsession with the (supposed) relatedness of details. The Poe geeks were talking about the writer’s stories, and were expected to remember every single detail on them and find relevance to the present murder: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Gold Bug,” and “X-ing the Paragrab’.”

There were other writers mentioned in the novel: Walter Benjamin, Sir Thomas Browne (“Treatise on X”), H. P. Lovecraft (The Nameless City), Abdul Alhazred/ El Hazzared (Al Azip/ Necronomicon, translated by John Dee in 1600; but is this “factual”?), and Jules Verne, but commented that the latter had “no literary talent.”

4. But what is the writer’s talent but, still according to Borges, this: “We have a gift for placing one word after another coherently and creatively, but we could unwittingly be serving a coherence entirely unknown to us and thus inventing terrifying truths. We write in order to remember, but those memories might belong to other people. We could be creating universes, like Akhenaten’s god, merely to amuse ourselves. We might unwittingly be placing monsters in the world. And without even leaving our chairs.”

5. And what initiates the writer? “I’ve always felt that in order to be a great writer, one should have experience of life at sea, which is why Conrad and Melville and, in a way, Stevenson, who ended his days in the South Seas, were better than all of us, Vogelstein. At sea, a writer flees from the minor demons and faces only the definitive ones. A character in Conrad says that he has a horror of ports because, in port, ships rot and men go to the devil. He meant the devils of domesticity and incoherence. The small devils of terra firma.”

~ After Luis Fernando Verissimo's Borges and the Eternal Orangutans (2000)