Review: The Journey

The Journey by Sergio Pitol
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m glad I read the introduction to this – written by George Henson – because otherwise I’d really have been lost. Henson argues that we should read Pitol as someone who (and I paraphrase) lives in text. He’s not writing a conventional memoir, nor a conventional novel. This is a book that simply moves forward in a space we may never have realized was a literary space.

In practice, that means Pitol is writing the story of his visit to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, but that his actual journey is only a frame for him to excavate his memories and his thoughts on other writers. It’s hard sometimes to tell where his dreams end and his opinions begin, and then there’s the deeper question of what he’s seeing and experiencing during his Georgian visit.

I don’t know Pitol’s other work (a friend gave me this one to read), but I understand that he’s one of Mexico’s major literary figures. On the plus side, then, it’s striking to see how he finds affinities with Eastern European figures that have no reference to the U.S. perspective I generally take for granted. I’m happy to overhear him speaking with Georgian officials, and it’s a comfortable reminder that there are times I – as a U.S. reader and thinker – should just be quiet and listen.

I do have two larger concerns, though. On the one hand, this has a whiff of the deep excavation of self that has irritated me above all in David Foster Wallace but that I’ve been troubled by in Karl Ove Knausgard and even Elena Ferrante. Maybe I’ve missed some essential 21st Century aesthetic move, but I still value craft, and, for me at least, the central job of such craft is to focus an account. There’s a sloppiness of form to all these generally acclaimed writers. They boast the chance to live within the interesting mind of an other, but I find it overwhelming and distracting. I want to know what the central story is rather than to be subject to the changing whims of my narrator.

In other words, I think authors have a responsibility to exclude much of what they might otherwise choose to put in. Craft dictates that we cut out things that don’t fit or, more imposingly, that we find the form that can accommodate such movement. I love ideas that clash with the main argument; I’m troubled here and elsewhere when I feel as if I’m being asked to accept a complete change of gears.

On the other hand, I am intrigued by the play of Pitol’s mind, and I’d be interested to see what he might do in a form that called on him to work more with narrative. There’s a peculiar moment in the chapter dated “30 May” when he interrupts his descriptions of meals with various Georgians to write, “My approach to all these activities is real, but there also lives in me the project of the novel of the lower bodily stratum. I long to get to Prague [where he’s been living], to the shelf where Bakhtin’s book…is located.”

In other words, in the middle of this strangely formed book, we get the writer telling us he’s more interested in a book he’s hoping to write.

I can conceive of an argument that privileges such an approach to literature. I can see how some people would prefer the raw materials of a project to the potential project itself. I guess I can see how some would praise what I might call a deconstructed piece of literature.

Still, if I can conceive all that, I can’t quite experience it. There’s a lot that’s interesting here, but I think I’d rather read the novel he went on to write about this trip to the notebooks, dreams, and outlines that we get here.


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