The Book of All Loves E-Book

Agustín Fernández Mallo

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 264

Beschreibung

In the wake of the Great Blackout, faced with the near-extinction of humanity, a pair of lovers speak to each other. They parse, with precision, with familiarity, the endless aspects of their love. Out of their dialogues, piece by piece, a composite image of love takes form, one that moves outwards beyond the realm of relationships and into metaphysics, geology, linguistics, AI.    Years previously, a writer and her husband, a Latin professor, stay in Venice while she works on a text. As they roam the city, strange occurrences accumulate, signalling that the world around them is heading towards a point of no return.    Blending fiction and essay, poetry and philosophy, Agustín Fernández Mallo's The Book of All Loves is a startling, expansive work of imaginative agility, one that renders love unfamiliar so as to renew it, and makes the case for hope in the midst of a disintegrating present.

Leseprobe

3‘A protean taxonomy of love whose shape veers between three modes, that of commonplace book, gendered dialogue and metafiction. Agustín Fernández Mallo finds not one but many envelopes to contain the cosmos.’

— Jesse Ball, author of Autoportrait

‘The Book of All Loves defies definition. The prose gallops on from one shining brilliance to the next, both disarmingly playful and devastating. Gorgeous, melancholic, mysterious – it is a book to be read again, many times.’

— Claire Oshetsky, author of Chouette

‘In his Book of All Loves, Fernández Mallo offers us an encyclopaedia of loves, each one sounding – as if for the first time – as a pure tone, from an infinite spectrum of tones. Here is a book unlike any other, a book that recreates and regenerates love, even as it asks us whether it is strong enough to hold.’

— Amy Arnold, author of Lori & Joe

‘The Book of All Loves is a deeply poetic novel … Fernández Mallo reflects on the present through the past, and projects us into a future where the conditions of the self, the environment, relationships and the body are all called into question.’

— El Mundo

‘Reading Agustín Fernández Mallo is the closest thing in literature to putting on a VR headset.’

— La Vanguardia

‘There are certain writers whose work you turn to knowing you’ll find extraordinary things there. Borges is one of them, Bolaño another. Agustín Fernández Mallo has become one, too.’

— Chris Power, author of A Lonely Man

4‘The most original and powerful author of his generation in Spain.’

— Mathias Enard, author of The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild

Praise for The Things We’ve Seen

‘The Things We’ve Seen confirms Fernández Mallo as one of the best writers in Spanish, with an absolutely unique style and fictional world.’

— Jorge Carrión, New York Times in Spanish

‘Charmingly voracious and guided by fanatical precision and wit, Mallo ties the loose threads of the world together into intricate, charismatic knots. This is the expansive, omnivorous sort of novel that threatens to show you every thought you’ve ever had in a new and effervescent light, along with so many others you couldn’t have dreamed.’

— Alexandra Kleeman, author of Intimations

‘Some great works create worlds from which to look back at ourselves and recalibrate; The Things We’ve Seen takes the world as it is and plays it back through renewed laws of physics. Rarely has a novel left me with such new eyes, an X-ray view of the present.’

— DBC Pierre, author of Meanwhile in Dopamine City

‘A strange and original sensibility at work – one that combines a deep commitment to the possibilities of art with a gonzo spirit and a complete absence of pretention.’

— Christopher Beha, Harper’s

‘Mallo’s imagination never falters. To stay with him means loosening all limitations we might wish to impose on a text. The reward is an audacious adventure…. This is, indeed, a dream of a book.’

— Declan O’Driscoll, Irish Times

5Praise for the Nocilla Trilogy

‘A breathtaking work of innovation and heart.’

— Stuart Evers, Guardian Best Books of 2015

‘By juxtaposing fiction with non-fiction … the author has created a hybrid genre that mirrors our networked lives, allowing us to inhabit its interstitial spaces. A physician as well as an artist, Fernández Mallo can spot a mermaid’s tail in a neutron monitor; estrange theorems into pure poetry.’

— Andrew Gallix, Independent

‘Bunstead’s translation of Nocilla Dream is great news not just for those particularly interested in contemporary Spanish literature. It is also simply a wonderful work of avant-gardist fiction – in the line of David Markson, Ben Marcus.’

— Germán Sierra, Asymptote

‘An encyclopaedia, a survey, a deranged anthropology, Nocilla Dream is just the cold-hearted poetics that might see America for what it really is. There is something deeply strange and finally unknowable to this book, in the very best way – a testament to the brilliance of Agustín Fernández Mallo.’

— Ben Marcus, author of The Flame Alphabet

‘To call the works that comprise Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy wide-ranging wouldn’t be inaccurate, but it would miss the mark in terms of just how much these books manipulate and revise concepts of language and narrative. They fall somewhere between Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String and Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights in their unpredictability, their sense of risk, and the utter joys that can arise from reading them.’

— Tobias Carroll, Lit Hub6

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THE BOOK OF ALL LOVES

AGUSTÍN FERNÁNDEZ MALLO

Translated by THOMAS BUNSTEAD

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‘You can look at these true shapes all day and not see the bird.’

— Anne Carson, ‘Audubon’10

Contents

Title PageEpigraphI.II.III.IV.About the AuthorsCopyright

11

I.

12Looking at the world in silence, and in silence writing what is seen. Writing the silence itself. This is what it is to love the world. (Silent love)

Where has it come from, this whole landscape of wounds?

– he says.

From bodies without passion, which are also landscape.

– she says.

The first inventory of colours generally agreed to be of any significance was compiled in around 1790, when the botanist Thaddäus Haenke, after numerous expeditions studying the flora of Mexico, Guatemala, New Zealand, the Mariana Islands and the Philippines, felt obliged to catalogue the hundreds of tones until then undetected in the sciences and arts alike. Haenke expanded the known palette from just a few hundred to 2,487 chromatic tones. He completed his map of colours in the same place he ended his days, Cochabamba, Peru, where he tended and studied – study also being a way of tending to things – the garden behind the house he built there. It was said by a number of those who attended his deathbed that what he really wanted to leave behind was not an inventory of colours, but one taking in the gamut of love’s tones, its every shade, saturation, texture and glittering. (Pantone love)

Our first kiss burned our tongues out completely, and yet still it burns on them.

– he says.

Paradoxical perfection in bodies that meet.

– she says.

13There is a moment in the experience of love when you start to cut yourself on everything. On the edges of drawers and on the screen of your mobile phone, on your toothbrush and when you’re watering a house plant, when you put on your trousers and when you take them off, when you open a book or close a door, when you tie your shoelaces and when you adjust the thermostat on the central heating; even bars of soap and the handrails on buses cut you. Suddenly objects of all kinds want to sharpen their edges on you. (Blade love)

The first time I touched you it was like coming home. A home I’d never been in before.

– he says.

Since being with you, I’ve lost my fear of routine.

– she says.

The lowest manifestation of realism is the extrapolation of statistics about the future. The most naïve manifestation of nostalgia, meanwhile, is the use of those same statistics to make extrapolations about the past. When couples split up, unbeknownst to them, each takes one of these completely opposed approaches. (Statistical love)

After the Great Blackout, our hair suddenly turned white. Like the snow on these mountains, which fell one morning and has never gone away.

– she says.

Even polar bear fur isn’t white. If you look at each hair closely, one at a time, you’ll see that it’s transparent.

– he says.

14The Vikings, voyaging to the Mediterranean from their frozen northern seas, did not do so hugging the coasts of what we nowadays call Europe. Rather they crossed the continent along the Rhine and other watercourses, skilfully connecting one to the next; navigating fresh water to join two bodies of salt water via the shortest possible route: a kind of cultural geodesic. Along the way they burned towns, animals and the land itself, plundering anything of value – but leaving the flowers on the waysides and, in the cases where they were embroidered, the drapery in people’s houses too. It was not that they disliked these things, but that they were invisible to them – the Viking eye untrained for detecting that class of object. Nor did they plunder the beaches themselves when they arrived in what is now Italy; the grains of sand were so smooth, so spherical and gleaming that they did not even see them. What kind of shortest-line-between-two-points is this, then, that ‘does not see things’? The birds migrating to this continent in the present day also bear in their sexual organs a layer of stamens and ancient minerals that they cannot see and yet scatter as they go. (Geodesic love)

When we don’t notice the night creeping up on us, it’s our vision that’s lacking, not the night.

– she says.

Since the Great Blackout, you’ve loved me in a different way, you’ve fed another flame.

– he says.

The images we see in sleep evolve as we grow older, but then, when we become adults, cease to correspond to the 15biological body and enter a state of eternal youthfulness: your dream images stop ageing, stop maturing. In old age, and while the march of material degradation continues in the body, the world of sleep and dreams even goes into reverse; at this point, elderly people grow accustomed to the kind of night visions common to the dream life of children. There is no such thing as dreams that belong only to the old, hence their propensity, in waking life, for that strange blend of melancholic yearning for what is lost and an intense hopefulness for the future. And it is not that this asymmetry between the growth of the body and the unfolding of dreams takes place within the passage of time; it is time itself. Nor, when it manifests between two bodies, does love grow any older; love being little more, finally, than a spectre, a constant reverie. And wood is the only material on earth produced by dry seeds, chlorophyll embryos that never grow old. (Asymmetric love)

Yesterday, when I picked up that snail which, big and orange like a moving sun, was trying to hide in the grass, and I placed it in the palm of your hand, it slid slowly along and sucked itself onto the tips of your fingers, as though it had grown out of your fingerprints. You watched it and said nothing.

– he says.

There’s a snail sheltering inside my ears too – the only cavity in my body your tongue has yet to explore.

– she says.

Pueraria lobata is the greatest and fastest colonizing plant on the planet. This perennial vine grows at up to 30 centimetres a day. So predacious is it that in places such as 16Florida, Georgia and Alabama it has been classified as a plague. It can swarm forwards over cars and entire homes in a matter of days, burying them under its weight. It scales lampposts, finds its way into sewers, its viridescent network reaching as far as the coast, where still it lives on: it lies around lethargically on grains of sand – tiny pebbles worn down by the ebb and flow of the tides. This began in 1876, when the centennial celebration of the American Declaration of Independence was marked with offerings from a number of countries to this, the greatest country of the New World. France famously gave the Statue of Liberty. Japan’s gift was a few samples of Pueraria lobata. (Independence love)

There’s a mausoleum inside our bodies. Our organs have something of both life and death in them, rubble of all we have left behind.

– she says.

When you allow me to enter you, what I’m trying to do is to bring life to that dead part.

– he says.

‘A person’s face does not exist in itself,’ Alfred Hitchcock said, ‘only when a light shines on it.’ An activity that is common but nonetheless just as strange as shining a light on people’s faces is the packaging up of things; we package up everything. The internet is only millions of metres of cable that package up the globe. Or take plants, which, left to grow unchecked, would package it up too. Or when people embrace: what is an embrace but the packaging up of the other, giving them a shape unknown to all but you. Or what is choosing one’s gender but the packaging up of 17sex. Meaning there is no need to wrap things up as gifts or send them in the post in order to give them an outline or an identity; light does that for us already. There is no face, once illuminated, that does not fill the beholder’s eyes with love. (Parcel love)

You and I are nothing.

– he says.

In a world whose only desire is to devour everything, it’s better to be nothing.

– she says.

What links us to childhood are our Christian names, which stay with us to the end. What links us to childhood is, in other words, language. There is only one thing that an adult cannot do, which is learn to speak. Speech, at the dawn of humanity, was something invented by children, which it still is; every infant’s first words mark a new beginning for language. The funny part is that both things – your Christian name, language – come from without, are given to you by others, just as your gender is also given to you. And the years go by, and adult love arrives, which does everything within its power to invert this process, to turn it on its head: when two people are in love they are forever seeking a return to childhood, to create new names, new sexes, to invent a private language, to recast from inside all that is known and create a new roof for them alone; a place to take shelter. This is why the image, present in every culture throughout history, of a couple loving one another under what appears to be a sheet has nothing to do with modesty around nakedness but – in this improvised cave that is theirs and theirs alone – with 18rebelling against the language imposed in childhood. (Contra-language love)

I went to a museum once. Everything there was spectacularly still. It was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen.

– he says.

A body is also a silent avenue; extreme mute sex.

– she says.

Falling in love consists of allowing someone to install you inside their head and, once they have you there, trapped forever in their dreams, to do with you as they please; from that moment on you will become a mobile archive inside their body. There is much talk about archives, about the information we register and transmit either through the written word or verbally to those who come after us, but what about that which is forgotten? No archive exists that could ever store all that’s forgotten, not because it can never return or be remembered, but because so much is forgotten that the world it occupies is larger than our own by various orders of magnitude. Memory loss, though apparently taking something away from us, also constitutes us. Meaning that when we transmit information, we also transmit all of those forgotten worlds, although in a manner that we are still yet to completely comprehend. This forgetting is me introduced into the heads of others, is my life enclosed in that place, or the part of me accessible only to the person who – in the experience of love – has me inside their head, even though this person (I know) may have forgotten me forever. (Oblivion love)

19You and I are always airborne, always beating our wings to stop ourselves from crashing to earth.

– he says.

Do you remember when we went looking for warmth in the perpetual snow?

– she says, pointing to the snow-capped mountain outside the window.

This science we call economics exists and makes sense only in a world where resources are scarce; if goods and commodities were infinite, there would be no logic to it as a discipline, as it would lose its subject and have nothing to either study or regulate. Our societies have seemingly been constructed on the basis of this congenital scarcity in the world. In western culture, it’s already there in the Bible; from the garden that is bountiful without being worked to the disapproval of working for one’s daily bread, which will materialize without anyone breaking a sweat. The apparent crisis in the music industry, with its origins in the early 21st century, and the also apparently infinite availability of songs on the Internet, is only the panic experienced in the face of the move from an economy of (musical) scarcity – run by a handful of individuals – to an economy of abundance – the infinite reproduction of sounds at no apparent cost; a situation in which the economic sciences as currently conceived would cease to have any practical or philosophical meaning. Gender theories have something revealing to offer here: from the masculine/feminine binary, or an economy of sexual identity based on a limited number of genders, to the potentially infinite spectrum of genders in-between that an individual may adopt, a kind of economy of (gender) abundance comes about in which learnt social norms lose 20all validity, giving rise to a panic among those who do not wish to or are unable to give up control of that particular privation. There is a certain structural link between all of this and the incipient field of quantum computing. The foundational property of these future computers is the ability to work not only in binary states, not solely with ones and zeros, but also using everything between the two poles of one and zero, making for potentially infinite possibilities that in turn give rise to worlds and planes of reality not only previously unknown but unimagined, though not therefore impossible. What we could call Gender Abundance Love would therefore be the forerunner, the analogue speartip, as it were, of this other digital abundance towards which computers are heading. (Gender Abundance Love)

After the Great Blackout, there were people who asked to be placed inside the pelts of wild animals and buried – animals which, as though sprung from some non-existent nearby forest, had occupied the streets at that time.

– he says.

I helped with those shrouds. We would place the person inside a bag made from the pelts, which we then sewed up. Just before the final stitch, a nameless bird would fly out of the hole in the seam. It was impossible to follow it with your eyes.

– she says.

It sometimes happens that, in trying to get away from someone, you flee so fast and so heedlessly that you end up lost in some unknown place, disoriented, with no idea 21of what the next step will bring. If it is love we are talking about, we classify these journeys as ‘leaving someone without having that someone in mind’. There is no emotional rupture that does not consist of creating such a compass without a map. (Cut-and-run love)

Sometimes, when it starts to grow light in the valley and you’re still asleep and the early morning sunlight through the window begins to shine on your body, it’s like my eyes have never seen you before, like you’ve come into being simultaneously with the morning. Then I don’t know what you’re dreaming about, and I start to panic at the possibility I won’t recognize you when you wake.

– she says.

Your face, like water and like uranium, like birds and houseplants, like the sun’s corona and like writing, already existed before you were born. Your face has been among humans always. That was why I recognized you the moment I saw you.

– he says.

The fundamental difference between Christianity and Judaism is the greater intellectual dedication required by the latter. Christianity observes certain rituals; Judaism, as well as observing rituals, renders them an object of study. One of the reasons for this difference is that part of Christianity’s sacred text, the Bible, was composed of simplified translations of the Torah so that illiterate people could understand, and so propagate, God’s Word. Global geopolitics and the attendant conflicts ever since can be boiled down to this ancient and unresolved original separation. As for the way they treat love, both 22religions manifest the same primitive idea of servitude associated with household pets. (Pet love)

I’ve lost count of the number of years I’ve spent coming to your body every day to build and destroy the same dream.

– she says.

But the eternal return doesn’t mean the same thing always returning.

– he says.

Snakes use their tongues, their bifurcate tongues, to smell with. The tips of these tongues detect the concentration of a certain smell to the left or right, prompting the reptile, depending on whether the smell is that of a predator or potential prey, either to alter its course or keep going straight ahead. Something similar happens in the case of pigs and boars with their two nasal holes, which orientate them in survival situations. But this is not so with humans. Our nasal cavities are unable to distinguish between directions; we could have one single orifice rather than two and it would make no difference. The word amour,from the Latin amoris, is linked etymologically to ‘mother’. The ancient Greeks, however, had two different words for love, eros and agape, which respectively meant carnal love and every kind of affection distinct from sexual satisfaction; a bifurcate kind of love that we lost at some point in history, along with the capacity to orientate ourselves emotionally. (Bifurcate love)

God is achromatic now, absolutely neutral in colour, and that’s why He doesn’t judge me or you but limits Himself 23to watching the sweat exuded by and then dripping down our bodies. God’s only intervention is to make the water inside us symmetrical: if for some reason a drop of sweat appears on my chest, He will make another, identical one appear on yours.

– she says.

But this divinity knows nothing about what we sweat over inside ourselves, you and I, nothing about our dreams. A nameless bird landed on our windowsill today, the first bird we’ve seen since the Great Blackout, and it’s going to fly through the sky above our heads again and again in the future; which is to say, it will fly through darkness, because it will do so through the absolute night that is the Great Blackout. This means we won’t see it, and even if we do, we wouldn’t recognize it. It will always be nameless. That which has no name does not exist. Like us: new-made.

– he says.

The idea of a city empty of humans and abandoned to the elements is a long-standing feature of a wide range of mythologies. Couples build real cities – out of physical matter, out of their affection, out of singular, unrepeatable customs and rituals: a language of their own. The peculiarity of this universe they create is that it isn’t destroyed if they split up, but simply enters the condition of abandoned city, of a ruin consigned to run its course in some unspecified place. We do not know the exact mutations this city-space undergoes, nor what form it ultimately takes, but what is certain is that, disconnected forever from all that is known, it is an emotional destination that nobody can ever go back to. Not even the people who built it – the former lovers – will get to walk its streets again. The city 24therefore becomes a literal utopia, the only true utopia there is, such is the disconnectedness but also the violence of its presence. And these things also mean that not even the present-day political dispensation, which as we know yearns for utopias and yet always ends up bringing about dystopias instead, dares go anywhere near it. And it is then, in this abandoned city, that the possibility arises for those of us on the other side to imagine – to idealize – an eternal kind of love: the so-called romantic love that enthusiasts for impossible experiences have been cultivating for centuries, with no little success. But romantic love is not the only option. We can look at it in the following way: if it is true that information is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed, it is also possible to think of this world created by the lovers, and now disconnected from our own, as a piece of lost information, a kind of information-love that we try in vain to recover on a daily basis. It is a disquieting thing to imagine this city of love, left alone, mutating, taking on new forms, adrift somewhere in the universe, but, at the same time, some gap must exist through which to introduce oneself, if only for brief seconds, to experience in real time the material and emotional information that, with nothing controlling it and as in a distorted mirror of what we once were, still reflects us in its streets. The key question, the one to undo what until now has been an unresolvable knot, would be the following: if in this city of lost love everything is information, what word will it bring? (Information love)

When I first met you, long before the Great Blackout, long before we came and inhabited this valley and this house, long before our love grew to such dimensions that we could no longer measure it, a terrible fear came over 25me of something happening that I once heard about, a story that has been with me since childhood. It’s about a man who, any time he speaks, makes his listener grow rapidly older.

– he says.

But that always happens. Naming things, speaking about them, means re-establishing their flow in time, giving them a life that sooner or later will destroy them. Only one thing opposes this kind of entropy: my sex and yours copulating.

– she says.

Lying does not mean not telling the truth. Lying means not telling the truth to someone who has a right to demand it. Even before a corrupt judge or jury, a fundamental legitimate defence sees this principle upheld. Among all relations, from the most mundane to the extraordinary, only in love do we find the exception that confirms this rule: we demand the absolute truth from our beloved even when we have no right to it, an idiosyncrasy that makes love the most vulgar, ordinary and mundane object of all, but also the opposite: the most anomalous and un-mundane. A contradiction in its nature that can only be ascribed to the fact that love – with all the passion and terror it entails – is not another thing in the world, not another element in the periodic table of experiences that we go along inventorying, but rather something that corresponds with the warp and weft, the ultimate substrate, of the farthest reaches of our knowledge. Everything is contained in love, and this also includes the place where, in an astonishing and now entirely unimportant blend, true and false find themselves mingled together. (Substrate love)

26I can’t get along with the idea of a book speaking, of the person reading it being able to hear it inside themself. A book is a mute thing, it’s the silence of the forest converted into another forest of silence. In all these years in this valley, I haven’t read a single book.

– she says.

Yes, you have: the longest and most arcane book ever written, sex between us. Undergrowth that stirs with no wind every sunrise. It speaks inside us.

–he says.

Dust, with all its smells, flavour and texture, is made of the union of excretions and silence. But, inside these new-made motes, there will again be silence, and more of it, a scandalous lack of sound that mysticism seeks to recycle and explain by inventing the presence of a mute, surreptitious god, a divinity that never speaks to us but nonetheless somehow demands that we explain ourselves. Any silence in a film, any white space separating the panels in a comic, any full stop followed by a new sentence on the pages of a novel, the blank spaces on your credit card, and any time two lovers fall silent and look at one another and are suddenly lost for words, it is the terrain of – the living, direct vision of – one moment in the life of this surreptitious, unspeaking god. (Silence love)

After so many years lying down together in the same bed, in the same posture, emitting the same bodily sounds, I’ve come to think that I don’t exist, that the repetition makes me dead to you.

– he says.

27If only. The dead person never dies again, they’re eternal.

– she says.

The fact that teeth and bones are all that remains of us after death is proof that our ultimate identity is mineral. We do not ascend, we are not on some track towards that which the ancients formulated as spiritual; on the contrary, we sink down into the most durable physical matter. A kind of periodic table of elements is what we are; more of the earth even than earth itself. And yet despite this, and paradoxically, we go on being completely ourselves: a DNA analysis of our bones and teeth would not fail to pick out our individual identity. On the night when the world’s love of photojournalism killed Diana, Princess of Wales, the boom on the news bulletins eclipsed another event that had more far-reaching consequences: in Algiers, the love of a religious fantasy led to scores of men, women and children being murdered. That night, the princess went to the heaven reserved for martyrs, while the Algerine murderers sank down into a long mineral silence from which their DNA now emerges in the form of so-called radical Islamism. (Fanatic love)

When you love truly, as you do, you leave the house and go hunting with all the stealth of that first nameless bird to come and land on our windowsill after the Great Blackout – but also with the strength of a wolf’s limbs. Then you come back. You bring your mossy pickings, dry by now, and beetles, too, with only their exoskeletons remaining, and sea salt from I don’t know where, and a handful of stones you tore from the hands of the predators that came after you. During your journey those stones have been 28so eroded that they no longer bear any resemblance to their original shapes; what was all unevenness and rough edges is now smooth pebbles. Not so your body, which comes back honed, whole.

– he says.

When you love truly, you hunt truly. That’s how long the journey takes.

– she says.