Eduardo Lago’s novel “I want Brooklyn to be my name”. – Culture

The book of a dead man, his name is Gal Ackerman, rests next to its creator, in Fenners Point in the small Danish cemetery on the American east coast, in a box specially attached to the grave. Gal’s friends deposited the novel of his life there, on which he worked for many years, in which he reflected on this life and that of his ancestors and the women he had loved, Nadja Orlov in front of all, the pianist. The book was intended for her, he didn’t finish it himself. “Brooklyn” should be its title.

Eduardo Lago’s novel “Let Brooklyn be my name” is both this book and the story of this book. When it was published in 2006, Lago received two important Spanish literary prizes. After Gal’s death, his friend Néstor Oliver Chapman took on the bundle, Gal sarcastically called it “the final resting place”, the “manuscript graveyard”, and after years of work “redeemed” the book, sorted out and destroyed a vast amount of material.

As a model for such a procedure, the book is haunted by the activities of the pastor and the barber who sort out the dead knight’s harmful novels of chivalry in “Don Quixote”. The fortunes of the books … Néstor also wrote the account of what happened after Gal’s death – how Gal’s book was stolen from its resting place and by whom it was read and sent back.

Lago’s book stands in the great tradition of labyrinthine, circular narratives that Spanish and Latin American writers love, Borges or Julio Cortázar or Enrique Vila-Matas, who is a friend of Eduardo Lago and with him founded the Orden del Finnegans, which is devoted to veneration dedicated to the work of James Joyce. The narration, in which the narration itself is reflected, the subject always also becomes the narration, already existed in Cervantes or Boccaccio and his Decameron. A narrative thread in “Brooklyn” extends to Certaldo, where Boccaccio lived for the last part of his life and then died.

There is a time table and a list of people that could help guide the reader, but order is more subjective. Gal’s relatives are there, and Frank Otero, owner of the Oaklandwhere Gal wrote many of his texts, Niels Claussen, an officer in the Danish merchant navy, who is deserting, but also O. Henry or Edgar Lee Masters, Thomas Wolfe or Dylan Thomas, because they all stayed at the Chelsea Hotel at one point – yes, they too The history of Chelsea is told in detail in Gal’s novel – and finally τπ, to which a chapter in Gal’s book is dedicated, Thomas Pynchon, when he was still out and about in New York and heard Thelonious Monk in a jazz bar. Or Manjit Singh, the taxi driver who brings Gal to the city from LaGuardia Airport on his return to New York. There are recollections of the 1927 trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, and a chapter in Gal’s book deals with the suicide of the painter Mark Rothko.

It is a book of the driven, who seek and find and lose each other, who get out and desert, who live on the sidelines and in denial. Like Leopold Bloom with Dublin, Gal is closely connected with New York and especially with Brooklyn, already through his father Ben and grandfather David Ackerman, who was with the Brooklyn Eagle Was a typesetter and proofreader and was also allowed to write a column on New York for a while. With his grandfather, young Gal explores Brooklyn, Cooper’s Corner and Nautilus Avenue, and finally Coney Island, the “Island of Dreams”, the shooting galleries and love barrels, the Cyclone roller coaster and of course the parachute jump tower.

Like many Spanish authors, Lago loves Anglo-Saxon literature

Llámame Brooklyn … Call Me Brooklyn, the Spanish and English titles are more laconic and precise than the somewhat pathetic German one. Two great American novels suggest that Lago was important, Melville’s “Moby Dick” with his first sentence “Call me Ismael” and Henry Roth’s “Call It Sleep”. Like many Spanish authors, starting with Borges, Lago loves Anglo-Saxon literature, has translated a lot into Spanish, Sylvia Plath and Henry James, Hamlin Garland and Charles Brockden Brown, and interviewed many contemporary authors for El País and Madrid Review of Books, Philip Roth and David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo and Joyce Carol Oates, Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison, Edward Said and Norman Mailer. Lago was director of the Instituto Cervantes in New York from 2006 to 2011 and now teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Of course, “Brooklyn” is also a historical, a political book, about (left) ideals and militant engagement. “You have an open account with the past …”, and Gal knows what that means, with his dark skin and his Mediterranean facial features. The name is deceptive, he is a Spaniard, an anarchist child, adopted by Americans. The mother died in childbirth during the Spanish Civil War. The story of the Ackermans is closely connected with that, with the Lincoln Brigade, in which many Americans fought.

The permanent and the fleeting are not in contradiction in this book

With the combination of vigorous colportage and gentle intellectual reflection, Eduardo Lago creates an exciting version of magical realism, even more inspired than the Latin American version of “Ulysses” by Joyce, which is important for Lago – in an award-winning comparative study he wrote the three translations of the “Ulysses” compared to Spanish – isn’t “Ulysses” also a political work?

“Brooklyn” is a stranded book, a novel in exile about them Americaniards, a small community in the middle of Brooklyn that maintains a connection to home through the Spanish language. But what is Gal’s mother tongue? He speaks perfect Spanish and has often traveled to countries to maintain this level of perfection, often to Oaxaca, with Nadja. Gal and Nadja, this is an incredibly dense love story, and of course it has to end in non-commitment. Nadja Gal had last written in early 1987, a postcard from Las Vegas. She got married and had a daughter.

The permanent and the fleeting are not in contradiction in this book, what is supposed to survive has to evaporate. The lavishly easy handling of texts (by Gal and Néstor) gives it a great weightlessness. Stories are quickly written and given away, stories are fabricated from newspaper reports, a letter is personally handed to the addressee and not accepted by him, and in the end there is an exchange of emails in which the sender does not reveal his identity. Write a poem on cigarette paper and then smoke … this is what this writing looks like.

The living cling to words and seek secret meanings in them

A writing in itself … publishing is absolutely secondary. “I know I’ll never deal with what I’m writing down again. It will stay here, trapped in the paper, but my memory will be pure afterwards.” In an epilogue, Eduardo Lago tells how he also practiced this kind of writing; he furiously filled notebook after notebook with observations, but not intended for others.

Solitaire writing, a communication that does not correspond to the usual definitions, the driving force of which is circulation. Writing that is very close to silence – psychoanalysis has researched it for decades. “I travel with bags that are filled with silence, in the midst of huge, colorless holes, soundless abysses, wordless corridors in which the light is lost, like a morning star pulling me towards dusk … I didn’t invent the shapes , they came to see me that night. ” A passage from Gal’s tale of the suicide of the painter Mark Rothko. “The living cling to words and seek secret meanings in them. Nothing is cleaner and more eloquent than silence.”