Barely a Book Club #8: Kalpa Imperial
Welcome back to Barely a Book Club, an offshoot of the Something Good newsletter. This instalment is the official kick-off for our third selection, Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was, translated by Ursula K. LeGuin. You still have plenty of time to locate yourself a copy, preferably at an independent bookseller, but you won’t need to have read it at all to enjoy the following, which I intend as an introduction to the book and its author.
There’s an interview with Angélica Gorodischer, conducted by writer and academic Marguerite Feitlowitz in 1989, that’s still miraculously preserved online at the BOMB Magazine website. I found it while looking for information on the Argentine writer, who passed away in 2022 at the age of 93. Only a handful of her many books were translated into English, and resources on her in this language are scant, so I’ve seized on the few interviews available.
At the time of the interview, Argentina’s horrific “Dirty War,” conducted by the ruling military junta against its own people, was still very much in the recent past, and, as Feitlowitz explains in the introduction to the interview, President Carlos Menem had recently pardoned all of the country’s military officers facing human rights charges (these pardons would later be revoked in 2003).
One particular exchange jumped out at me:
Angélica Gorodischer: We are a people with a bad memory, a people hostile to memory. Old houses, the national library, the national archives—we destroy the very things that constitute our country’s memory. The country lacks an abiding urge to accumulate, safeguard and circulate reliable documentation. The crucial task of the writer here is to remember, to try to remember. Not that we should all literally note down facts and events. But memory is inscribed in a literary text in a process I don’t think anyone really understands.
Marguerite Feitlowitz: Do you feel any temptation, perhaps on a submerged level, to encode what you have to say, or to censor yourself as a protection against censorship or repression?
AG: I want to tell you something. I’m afraid. I’m still afraid. Even if you weren’t on a death list, and I wasn’t, something like The Terror marks you.
MF: In what way?
AG: I don’t know exactly. And I don’t want to know. As Borges said, one must write in a state of innocence. My writing has changed—change is an integral part of writing—and that to me is good. I’d go so far as to say that all of our writing has changed. We all live with the knowledge that during the Dirty War, some left, some stayed, some collaborated, some were tortured. I suppose to some extent we all encode that knowledge so we can go on living and writing with it, so it doesn’t destroy us.
I could not but think of the first sentence of Kalpa Imperial, which I posted here last week:
The storyteller said: Now that the good winds are blowing, now that we’re done with days of anxiety and nights of terror, now that there are no more denunciations, persecutions, secret executions, and whim and madness have departed from the heart of the Empire, and we and our children aren’t playthings of blind power; now that a just man sits on the Golden Throne and people look peacefully out of their doors to see if the weather’s fine and plan their vacations and kids go to school and actors put their heart into their lines and girls fall in love and old men die in their beds and poets sing and jewelers weigh gold behind their little windows and gardeners rake the parks and young people argue and innkeepers water the wine and teachers teach what they know and we storytellers tell old stories and archivists archive and fishermen fish and all of us can decide according to our talents and lack of talents what to do with our life—now anybody can enter the emperor’s palace, out of need or curiosity; anybody can visit that great house which was for so many years forbidden, prohibited, defended by armed guards, locked, and as dark as the souls of the Warrior Emperors of the Dynasty of the Ellydróvides.
This is nominally a book club about travel writing, about places real and fantastical. While Kalpa Imperial seems to fit in the latter category, reading this interview helped me understand how these subjects, and places, can exist in both at once. Not a novel, not quite a travelogue like Hav, but a loose series of linked tales sketching a rough history of an imagined empire—the greatest that never was!—the book feels somewhere between history, myth and fiction. (In other words: the ideal Barely a Book Club selection.) It was first published in two volumes, starting in 1983, the last year of the military junta. This year is the book’s 40th anniversary.
Later in the interview, Gorodischer says, “I thought I was writing a Western version of The Thousand and One Nights. But in 1983 when the initial volume was published, I realized it was all about terror. The fictions brought me round to reality.”
Angélica Gorodischer was born in Buenos Aires in 1928, but she lived most of her life in the city of Rosario, a city known for its Art Deco and Art Nouveau architecture and its dissident social movements. She’s widely described as a science fiction author, though she wrote about many diverse subjects, fictional and not.
In an interview which appears on the Small Beer Press website, she says:
I don’t necessarily consider myself a science fiction writer. I feel comfortable with science fiction, of course, although I don’t write it any more… SF leaves a very strong mark and it always appears in my writing in some fashion. Except perhaps in my latest book, which is something of a summary of the urban novel.
I like to change. If it were up to me I would change every week the position of my furniture. I would move houses every year and so on. I’ve written all kinds of things. I’ve written what some call realism, I’ve written fantastic fiction (not “fantasy”, God save me), crime, SF…. The novels that you call historical aren’t really historical. They are set in old times but there is nothing factual about them. Everything, everything, everything is made up. Another critic friend of mine tells me that I am an atypical writer. I also like that!
As far as I can tell, of her 30 or so books, only four have been translated into English: Kalpa Imperial, Trafalgar, and Prodigies were all published by Small Beer (there’s a nice piece about their journey with her books here), and Jaguars’ Tomb, translated by Amalia Gladhart, which was published by Vanderbilt University Press.
Let’s give ourselves a little time to locate and read this book. Meet back here in early December? Feel free to jump into the comments and share your impressions as you go.
A very special thanks to Barely a Book Club reader Rox, who brought Kalpa Imperial to my attention in the comments of one of the entries on Hav.
If you’re not a member of this club and you’d like to be, all you need to do is subscribe below. After you do, check out the archives—this is an asynchronous book club, meaning you can read the selections whenever you want and come back and join the discussion on the relevant posts whenever you like. See you again in December!
