with abandon
a playlist for Zama
This month I read Zama, an excellent, overlooked existentialist novel about a bureaucrat of the Spanish monarchy who *goes insane* in remote, colonial Paraguay. We follow his emotional swells as he moves from restlessness to lust to violence to paranoia to hallucinatory fantasy.
He works himself up, drops everything, becomes breathless, retreats into new obsessions, and batters himself relentlessly against a tide that keeps him in the same place, like the corpse of a monkey he witnesses floating in the bay. It is both still and ever-moving. Brutal really.
The prose itself is gorgeous. I very much enjoy the artifacts that arise when you translate something from Spanish into English. Antonio di Benedetto was a journalist, so there are traces of Hemingway in his style, but it’s cut through with just the most beautiful words I’ve ever seen strung together to describe the air, women, the moon, alienation and rage. The book is a bit like Dostoevsky fan fiction — one of his major influences.
Divorced from context, these quotes I’ve pulled could be rom-commy, but please remember they are the voice of a psychopath colonizer about to ruin himself. And everyone around him. Zama stands-in for the collective psyche of the exiled living in the last scrap of the untamed world.
Thank you Coyote Book Club for the recommendation
Incidentally I’ve been feeling a lot of things. Roving inspiration, mostly! It’s like I’ve just broke a fever and now painting, writing, books and music mean something to me again. In a more lush, preoccupied way. Like I’m breaking a fast by having a big bowl of goulash every night but the goulash is art.
So, WITH ABANDON is a playlist that is mostly about Zama (that has been the backdrop to my life as of late)(I love when a book does that) but also about Being Back on My Bullshit. It’s all over the place on purpose,, and I feel very cute n coy n silly about putting Dion and Ceremony in the same room together, in a sense. Come run around the room with me. Let’s be cwazy.
You can listen here:
