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A review by vaticerratic
El Libro de Emma Reyes: Memoria Por Correspondencia by Emma Reyes
Truly unlike any other book I've read. A memoir of a hardknock but spectacular and almost enchanted childhood, with something like the dimensions of a Roald Dahl story.
When I went to Colombia for the first time this summer, I asked my colleague Catalina for reading recommendations about her country. She in turn graciously solicited recommendations from her friends, which I compiled into a big list. I'm slowly working myself through it and this book was on that list.
Emma Reyes was a 20C Colombian artist who based herself in Europe as an adult. She was admired as a story teller and was encouraged by some famous friends (like Gabo) to write her life's story.
This memoir arrives like a message in a bottle. It's compiled from letters that she wrote her friend Germán Arciniegas who published them after her death. She must have known they would be turned into a book. They form a continuous, linear narrative, as though she knew she were sending her friend one chapter at a time. There's even very little of the phatic function you normally see in letters ("I'm sorry I haven't written in so long," "I hope your family is well," etc.).
But there's still something mysterious about the text. The young Emma is abandoned by a series of caretakers, with only her sister Helena as a constant in her life. Naturally she indicates the size of this pain in the book. But something about the style is matter of fact and even ironic in a way that actually transforms the subject matter into something fantastic, as though a universe that was so cruel must also possess a degree of unreality.
Thus, tableaux that could almost be tall tales: for instance the sisters spend many years in a nunnery that's essentially a factory for indigent girls to work as laundresses and embroiderers. Multiple giant padlocked doors separate them from the outside world. When they first enter, a flood of girls comes rushing down the halls at them and she and her sister are separated like the victims of a shipwreck in rapids. Right away they meet a nun who was cursed to be fat by a cruel erstwhile love interest, and who the inhabitants of the cloister now believe must continue to eat and stay fat or else people will die. You get the picture.
Most of the letters are written within the space of just a few years (69-72 it seems, though not all of them are dated). It appears that they get shorter and more infrequent as time goes on, and they wrap up leaving so many questions unanswered: How does she transition to adulthood? How does she wind up in Europe and what is her life like there? Does she ever see Helena, or anyone from her childhood, again?
The framing of the story, and especially the ending, is maddeningly elliptical. It seems that the same narrative economy driving Reyes to withhold commentary on some of the horrific things that happen to her also keeps her from telling a story beyond the one she's assigned herself: the memorialization of an extremely marginal childhood, mostly absurd though with significant moments of pathos. Frustrating, tantalizing, hilarious in ways that make you feel guilty for laughing, about as perfect of a thing as exists in our fallen world.
When I went to Colombia for the first time this summer, I asked my colleague Catalina for reading recommendations about her country. She in turn graciously solicited recommendations from her friends, which I compiled into a big list. I'm slowly working myself through it and this book was on that list.
Emma Reyes was a 20C Colombian artist who based herself in Europe as an adult. She was admired as a story teller and was encouraged by some famous friends (like Gabo) to write her life's story.
This memoir arrives like a message in a bottle. It's compiled from letters that she wrote her friend Germán Arciniegas who published them after her death. She must have known they would be turned into a book. They form a continuous, linear narrative, as though she knew she were sending her friend one chapter at a time. There's even very little of the phatic function you normally see in letters ("I'm sorry I haven't written in so long," "I hope your family is well," etc.).
But there's still something mysterious about the text. The young Emma is abandoned by a series of caretakers, with only her sister Helena as a constant in her life. Naturally she indicates the size of this pain in the book. But something about the style is matter of fact and even ironic in a way that actually transforms the subject matter into something fantastic, as though a universe that was so cruel must also possess a degree of unreality.
Thus, tableaux that could almost be tall tales: for instance the sisters spend many years in a nunnery that's essentially a factory for indigent girls to work as laundresses and embroiderers. Multiple giant padlocked doors separate them from the outside world. When they first enter, a flood of girls comes rushing down the halls at them and she and her sister are separated like the victims of a shipwreck in rapids. Right away they meet a nun who was cursed to be fat by a cruel erstwhile love interest, and who the inhabitants of the cloister now believe must continue to eat and stay fat or else people will die. You get the picture.
Most of the letters are written within the space of just a few years (69-72 it seems, though not all of them are dated). It appears that they get shorter and more infrequent as time goes on, and they wrap up leaving so many questions unanswered: How does she transition to adulthood? How does she wind up in Europe and what is her life like there? Does she ever see Helena, or anyone from her childhood, again?
The framing of the story, and especially the ending, is maddeningly elliptical. It seems that the same narrative economy driving Reyes to withhold commentary on some of the horrific things that happen to her also keeps her from telling a story beyond the one she's assigned herself: the memorialization of an extremely marginal childhood, mostly absurd though with significant moments of pathos. Frustrating, tantalizing, hilarious in ways that make you feel guilty for laughing, about as perfect of a thing as exists in our fallen world.