Luis Sagasti

Reminds me of Adler and Offill and the somewhat dreaded, for me, "plotless novel", however this is really more of an extended creative essay that makes use of fictional elements while mostly working in a similar style to those authors. What I mean is that it is generally composed of short chunks of text, as if Sagasti has taken his research, put it on notecards, and then mixed the cards up in a fashion and read them through, perhaps in an effort to find new connections between seemingly separate but related things. And thus you get a whale song and a Rothko painting sharing both a page and a point.

As the title suggests the focus of the work is on music, more specifically its creative expression. It begins by imagining how the apocryphal story of the purpose behind Bach's composition of the Goldberg Variations may have played out, a Russian count who suffers from insomnia being lulled to sleep each night by a pianist playing the pieces the count specifically commissioned from Bach for this purpose. This nightly musical offering then has as its formal goal its opposite - silence, for the Count, as he falls asleep and the pianist quietly leaves.

Silence is paradoxically the constant companion to music in Sagasti's telling. As is its relative, disappearance. This is explored in more obvious ways, such as John Cage's (in)famous 4'33" or Glenn Gould's preference that his audiences not clap and for the lights to simply fade to darkness after his performance. But also through interesting less obvious ways, such as the "loneliest whale in the world" swimming the ocean by itself and making a song too high pitched for other whales to hear, detected by our scientific instruments singing and getting back only silence every year since 2004. And Rothko's "yellow painting", auctioned off every few years to be bought by a new investor at ever higher prices and moved from the seller's secure vault to the buyer's secure vault, never to actually be seen and witnessed. Rothko's offering stripped of all meaning and purpose in the world except as a minor mark in some billionaire's ledger, silenced, is about the saddest thing here, even among the stories of Japanese soldiers who hid in caves for decades or the starving residents of Leningrad listening to a new Shostakovich symphony.

There's a rather funny fable in the middle that departs from the general style of the book to tell about a gigantic organ commissioned by some Baron in an Alpine region that would play all orchestral sounds louder and better than any actual orchestra, but when finally completed and played to great fanfare caused an avalanche that buried it and the town that built it. Snow silenced this ultimate hubris of musical offering. Too much, too much.

If silence can be a lonely response or a righteous response, it can also be a meaningful response. Mahler's Ninth symphony, written not long after the death of the composer's daughter, ends with a solo violin fading into the distance followed by the conductor moving his baton to silence for several minutes. The audience thus sits with Mahler's grief in silence. "It seems," Sagasti writes, "that Mahler composed almost ninety minutes of music just to achieve that silence."

Shh.… (altro)

¿Dónde está el libro? / Where is the book?
Review of the Eterna Cadencia Kindle eBook edition (2020) of the Eterna Cadencia paperback original (2019)

"La primera vez que T. Gautier vio Las meninas de Velázquez dijo: "¡¿Pero dónde está el cuadro!?". Es el mejor elogio que se le puede hacer a una obra de arte." - Enrique Vila-Matas.

"The first time T. Gautier saw Las meninas by Velázquez, he said: "But where is the painting¡?". That is the best compliment that can be paid to a work of art." - Enrique Vila-Matas.

I very much enjoyed Luis Sagasti's mixed fiction/non-fiction style in the recent English language translations by Fionn Petch in A Musical Offering (2017/2020) and Fireflies (2011/2018). I was so taken with them that I searched out Sagasti's other, still untranslated works. This led me to his most recent published work, Leyden Ltd. (2019), which seemed paradoxically to be quite readable / translatable for a non-Spanish reader as myself.

Leyden Ltd. is not a book in the conventional sense. It consists of 550 footnotes spread over 6 chapters. The actual body of the supposed book is missing and you therefore have to imagine its contents based only on the footnotes. There is an index provided which provides the clue that the complete book would consist of at least 487 pages, based on its highest-numbered page reference.

The reason I describe this as "readable", is that most of those footnotes are one-sentence statements that usually relate to the various artistic, musical, historical, geographical etc. themes that are characteristic of Sagasti. A few of them relate to more obscure avant-garde composers e.g. Stockhausen, but most are from easily identifiable culture/pop-culture e.g. The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Emily Dickinson, etc. Some of the footnotes consist solely of photographic images.

So what is Leyden Ltd.? It is a secret organization, a sort of artistic Bilderburg Group or Illuminati. Its supposed leader (described as its general co-ordinator) is Paul Wilkes, whose excerpted diary entries make for a dozen or so of the footnotes. There are some fictional members named Matheson, Robinson and Pryce that are frequently mentioned. The fictional Robinson is described as being a photographer for the real-life graphic design firm Hipgnosis, famous for their record album covers for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and others. Supposed members drawn from real-life include artist Jenny Holzer and members of Monty Python.

The ironic tone with which Eric Idle and Michael Palin of Monty Python denied that they belonged to Leyden Ltd. in the 1970s is very eloquent. - Footnote 14 from Chapter 6 of Leyden Ltd.

In any case, you have to imagine the book however you wish to, based on the clues of the provided footnotes. Your enjoyment will likely depend on how easily you can identify the references and their real life or fictional basis. For myself, I enjoyed it thoroughly and I hope that I'll see further Sagasti in translation soon.

To conclude, a favourite footnote and a clue* to decipher it:

Only twenty-four days separate the two most famous walks of the 20th century. - Footnote 112 of Chapter 3 of Leyden Ltd.

Other Reviews
Las micro ficciones de Luis Sagasti (The microfictions of Luis Sagasti) at Página/12 (May 24, 2020).

*Hint: The Beatles are discussed in several footnotes prior to this one.… (altro)

Fireflies and the Fine Arts
Review of the Charco Press paperback edition (2018) translated from the original Spanish language "Bellas artes" (Fine Arts) (2011)

I enjoyed Charco Press' recent publication of Luis Sagasti's A Musical Offering (2017/2020) so much that I immediately wanted to read Fireflies as well. It was in the very same style as Offering, with its expanded fictional tales based on various true and/or exaggerated stories from real life.

I didn't research much about Sagasti's possible fictional improvisations, but several stories in Fireflies, especially the more outrageous ones, were definitely true. Or at least true in the sense that Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys did tell stories of his rescue by Tatar shamans in the Crimea in the 2nd World War, that futurist jazz pioneer Sun Ra did lead his quirky band of communal Arkestra members around the world for concerts and recordings, etc.

Throughout the book, the theme of fireflies, which you can read as metaphors for: sparks of light in the darkness, for truth among the fiction, for invention among the non-fiction, etc. is regularly returned to. That helps to explain the change of title suggested by excellent translator Fionn Petch and explained in his generous Afterword to the Charco edition. I'm not generally a fan of title changes in translation, but Fireflies as a title is definitely more intriguing than the somewhat generic original, which would have been Fine Arts.

I perhaps enjoy Luis Sagasti so much because so much of his esoteric tales about music, books, art and storytelling are recognizable to me as I have followed quite a lot of avantgarde music & art in the late 20th/early 21st century (I even saw a few Sun Ra concerts in Toronto for instance). So Sagasti immediately strikes chords of familiarity to me. Some others may find it more odd or curious.

Anyway, I'm completely taken in and am even attempting his latest, "Leyden Ltd." (2020), in the Spanish original, even though I don't read or speak Spanish. This is not as crazy as it sounds, as this latest book is written entirely in footnotes, i.e. short, mostly one-sentence statements of "fact." So in a sense you have to imagine what the missing book would actually be saying when all you have are its footnote artefacts to go by. That is the sort of quirky writing that very much appeals to me and perhaps to you, if you have read this far.… (altro)