Girls with Green Hair
BY MICHAEL WOOD, The New York Review of Books, March 14, 2002
"Portrait in Sepia"
by Isabel Allende,translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden
"Leaving Tabasco"
by Carmen Boullosa, translated from the Spanish by Geoff Hargreaves
"Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire"
by José Manuel Prieto,translated from the Spanish by Carol and Thomas Christensen
"Our Lady of the Assassins"
by Fernando Vallejo, translated from the Spanish by Paul Hammond
...The narrator of Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire—all four of these novels are narrated in the first person—mistrusts everything, and with good reason.
He is an adventurer engaged in smuggling out and selling off various articles to be found in Russia and the old Iron Curtain zone, "cut-rate antiquities" from Cracow,
the loot of "liquidation sales" in Berlin, night-vision glasses from a bankrupt Red Army. "I had passed through the smoking ruins of the Eastern Empire," he writes,
"from Varsovia to Cracovia, from Buda to Pest," "my sole activity: crossing the membranes of states (borders), taking advantage of the different values
between one cell (nation) and another."
His most recent commission is to acquire and illegally export a rare Crimean butterfly, and rather to his own surprise he has decided to try to catch a specimen rather than just steal
one from a museum. But then he gets swept up in a noncommercial venture of his own, a piece of reverse smuggling, helping to get a Russian call girl out of Istanbul and back into her
native land. The venture is a success in immediate practical terms, but now the woman has vanished, leaving our hero, J., alone in Odessa. He travels to Yalta, finds a hotel in the
resort town of Livadia, and it is there that he receives a series of letters from V., the woman he has rescued. We never see the letters, although the whole novel is a meditation on them,
a stately, lyrical, highly literary work which is genuinely haunting if a little overwrought, and not recommended if you're looking for action, or even relatively direct narration.
Prieto is a Cuban who has lived in Russia. This is his second novel.
To be precise, we do see the letters ("Seven sheets of rice paper illuminated by afternoon light. The page in my outstretched hand was full of fine writing, the blue lines recalling the
azure field that represents the sky in heraldry"), we just don't get to read them. We hear a lot about J. preparing his reply ("I felt truly inspired, like I could fill sheets till dawn"),
but it takes a while before we realize that the book is his reply, a long letter about letters—"this draft," he finally calls it, "this enormous draft."
We learn that J.'s native language is Spanish, that he is Cuban, that his mother lives in Havana. He is an "apprentice writer," he says, and we can tell he is a great reader.
The Tale of Genji, and works by Conrad, Chekhov, Poe, Dostoevsky, Ovid, Raymond Chandler, Pushkin, Aldous Huxley, and Oscar Wilde are all mentioned as if they were old friends.
And then he's done his homework for his projected epistle, and read pretty much all the famous letter collections. He gets them from a bookseller in Saint Petersburg called
Vladimir Vladimirovich, in whose shop he also finds a precious work of reference called Diurnal and Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire, by V.V. Sirin, just the thing
he needs for his chase of the rare Crimean creature. We never learn Vladimir Vladimirovich's last name. The bookseller can't be the Nabokov we know —for reasons of time and
place and occupation and death and because he's a fictional character—but the echoing name is carefully placed, and Nabokov's shade is everywhere in this novel. Readers of
The Gift will remember that the hero's father is the author of a work called Butterflies and Moths of the Russian Empire, and Sirin was Nabokov's pen name in exile. Nabokov
is also mentioned by name as the author of Lolita and the person who gave his collection of butterflies to a museum in Lausanne.
There are other ghosts in the novel, simply called Livadia in Spanish. The Tsars Alexander II, Alexander III, and Nicholas II all spent time in their palace in Livadia, which
is also where the Yalta agreements were signed, so that the memories of at least two now- defunct Russian empires congregate in the town, and J. pursues his thoughts of love
and letters on the edge of a momentous past. It is in this sense that Prieto can be thought of as transposing the music of magical realism, having his character reach into
history to find only disguise and speculation. J. himself tells us that you have to look "perfectly ordinary" when you go through customs anywhere, and then adds this beautiful
little gloss: "not perfectly innocent, which was always suspicious, but perfectly ordinary."
What is left of a lost love or a lost empire? Or in this case, what is left of a wish to love? At one stage J. thinks he should give up on his long project and write a
"little farewell note to V., something short, to the point, not to say that I had loved her but that I had wanted to." And the novel closes, or rather fails to close, in a
brilliant flurry of deception which owes a great deal to the ending of One Hundred Years of Solitude, with its manuscripts finally deciphered and delivered to the whirlwind.
This text is not, after all, that of J.'s enormous draft, because he has burned it:
...After reading her letters, I threw them all into the fire. I read this draft too, from beginning to end, and all my notes, the quotes from other people's letters—and then
threw them all into the fire. Some of them rose up, borne along on the hot air, flames licking their edges, red as butterflies. Yes, butterflies—why not?
J. then quotes a letter Henriette Vogel wrote to Heinrich von Kleist not long before their double suicide ("my dear constellation, my delicate caress, my stronghold, my fortune, my death"),
and the novel ends, "That is how I would begin my letter to V., free and full of feeling, and without a shadow of a doubt: My dearest Varia." At least we now know her name, but what exactly
have we been reading? J. is not going to commit suicide; this was not a grand romance. But at one point in the process of getting Varia back into Russia J. thinks of his action as "the ultimate
challenge, the coup de grâce to my years of heavy smuggling. It would be the finishing touch, the high point of my career, to transport a soul...." J.'s narrative is a memorial to his love of
subterfuge and his baffled ambition: to go on smuggling but in a higher cause, surrounded by darkened empires, Nabokov's butterflies, and the ecstatic language of a woman who adored death and her lover in equal portions...
