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the complete review - fiction

The Cardboard House

by
Martín Adán

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : odd but often striking text(s)

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "(T)he narrative's detailed descriptions of his native landscape and its people exhibit Adan's talent and foreshadow his success as an important Latin American poet, if not his skill as a novelist." - Publishers Weekly

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Martín Adán is known as a poet, and The Cardboard House is his only work of prose (and even so it includes some 'Underwood Poems' as well as a longer poem, 'Written Blindly', here included as an Afterword). The book is composed of short texts, focused on the Barranco area of Lima, and while there is some narrative progression -- a friend, Ramón, often features, and eventually dies -- it is largely a book of impressions, with Adán often veering off on rather creative tangents, or letting himself be carried away by language itself.
       Early on, Adán suggests: "the city is an oleograph we contemplate, sunken under water: the waves carry things away and alter the orientation of the planes" -- which conveys as well as anything what Adán is doing in this book. An oleograph is a color lithograph -- a layering of colors to achieve effect (apparently to imitate the look of an oil painting) -- and Adán's prose can seem like that, seen distorted under water .....
       Typical is a relatively extended riff on seeing a gringa (an Englishwoman) photographer in the shapes of a jacaranda tree, with descriptions such as:

The gringa was a roaming road, blinded by the sun, leading to the tundra, to a country of snow and moss where a gaunt, gray city of skyscrapers loomed as mysterious as the machinery in a dark factory.

Streetlamps -- the trunks of shrubs the light twists and the shadows turn green. At six in the morning, at six in the evening, the streetlamps are the most vegetable thing in the world, in an analytic, synthetic, scientific, passive, decisive, botanical, simple way -- the upper edges of the trunks support crystal jars that hold yellow flowers.

Now I can board a transatlantic liner. And during the crossing fish adventures like fish.

- M.A.Orthofer, 25 September 2012

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Links:

• New Directions publicity page
• Dulzorada publicity page
• Ediciones Barataria publicity page
• Written Blindly - the Afterword

• Bookforum
• Full Stop
• Jacket2
• Latin American Literature Today
• On the Seawall
• Publishers Weekly

• See Index of Latin and South American literature
• See Index of Books Written Between 1900 and 1945

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About the Author:

       Peruvian poet Martín Adán lived 1908 to 1985.

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