Desarticulaciones (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
My admiration for Sylvia Molloy is deep and the ways she has influenced my own thinking about literature, language and writing are countless. You can then imagine my excitement at hearing that not only would her 2010 novel, Desarticulaciones, be re-released in the U.S. by Charco Press this coming November, but that it would be translated into English for the first time by none other than Jennifer Croft. You also can imagine my immense sadness upon learning of her death on July 14.
Born in Buenos Aires to an Irish father and a French mother in 1938, Molloy was one of the most important figures of South American literature of the latter half of the 20th century. A pioneer in queer writing, Molloy wrote in all three of her native languages: French, Spanish and English. Much of her work dealt with the uncanniness of the multilingual, the translucent parallels between growing up queer and growing up between borders and linguistic spheres.
Reading Dislocations in the void left by her absence is all the more poignant. A brief, yet perfect, novel that grapples startlingly with loss in language, our protagonist M.L. becomes subsumed into words that no longer come and a life of language slipping through her fingers. But where words fail, translation remains.
As a graduate of the same faculty as Molloy - the department of Comparative Literature of the Sorbonne - it is without question that my education was indelibly shaped by her legacy and her impact on my generation of comparativists. When I first encountered Sylvia, through her academic writing and later her fiction, my understanding of queerness in literature was forever changed. An aspirational figure for me, she was also like an old friend I never met; one who could say so plainly what always eluded my own articulation.
My heart breaks losing such an immense force within Latin American letters; anyone writing in South America today can tell you how Molloy influenced them, particularly those who learned to play inside the palimpsestic and obscure. Yet I am consoled knowing that come November, a new community of readers will be introduced to a woman of true greatness
— CharlesC mo mantener una amistad intacta cuando el Alzheimer se va llevando consigo las bases del lenguaje, la memoria y las experiencias compartidas?
La narradora visita casi diariamente a ML., con quien comparti una estrecha amistad y ahora padece mal de Alzheimer. A partir de esos encuentros y los fragmentos de memoria de ML. va construyendo un relato poderosamente conmovedor sobre la desarticulaci n de una mente que progresivamente va borrando todo de una manera peculiar.Un intento, a trav's de la escritura, de "hacer durar una relaci n que contin a pese a la ruina, que subsiste aunque apenas queden palabras". " C mo dice yo el que no recuerda...?", se pregunta la narradora frente a esa mujer que le muestra la casa como si la visitara por primera vez o que es incapaz de decir que ha sufrido un mareo, pero puede traducir al ingl's perfectamente un mensaje donde se dice que ella ha sufrido un mareo.Pasajes de un pasado y un presente compartidos que se transforman en ficci n frente a un olvido que no puede contradecirlos. Un libro que opone al derrumbe una prosa precisa y vital y la sensibilidad nica de una de las mejores escritoras latinoamericanas.
In brief, sharply drawn moments, Sylvia Molloy's Dislocations records the gradual loss of a beloved friend, M.L., a disappearance in ways expected (forgotten names, forgotten moments) and painfully surprising (the reversion to a formal, proper Spanish from their previous shared vernacular). There are occasions of wonder, too--M.L. can no longer find the words to say she is dizzy, but can translate that message from Spanish to English, when it's passed along by a friend.
This loss holds Molloy's sense of herself too--the person she is in relation to M.L. fades as her friend's memory does. But the writer remains: 'I'm not writing to patch up holes and make people (or myself) think that there's nothing to see here, but rather to bear witness to unintelligibilities and breaches and silences. That is my continuity, that of the scribe.'
How do you keep a friendship intact, when Alzheimer's has stolen the common ground of language, memory, and experience, that unites you?
In brief, sharply drawn moments, Sylvia Molloy's Dislocations records the gradual loss of a beloved friend, M.L., a disappearance in ways expected (forgotten names, forgotten moments) and painfully surprising (the reversion to a formal, proper Spanish from their previous shared vernacular). There are occasions of wonder, too--M.L. can no longer find the words to say she is dizzy, but can translate that message from Spanish to English, when it's passed along by a friend.
This loss holds Molloy's sense of herself too--the person she is in relation to M.L. fades as her friend's memory does. But the writer remains: 'I'm not writing to patch up holes and make people (or myself) think that there's nothing to see here, but rather to bear witness to unintelligibilities and breaches and silences. That is my continuity, that of the scribe.'