Barely a Book Club #9: Dreaming of Kalpa Imperial
This is the third, and final, installment of our book club’s series on Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was. You can read the earlier posts here and here.
Welcome back to Barely a Book Club! Did you have a chance to read Kalpa Imperial? You’re welcome here either way. I could use a travelling companion.
A brief catchup: first published in two parts in Gorodischer’s native Argentina in 1983 and 1984, in the waning days of the country’s horrific “Dirty War,” Kalpa Imperial is an elliptical description of an imaginary empire in 11 chapters. It’s almost easier to define what this book is not: not a history, not a travelogue, not a guidebook (imaginary or not), certainly not a novel.
Kalpa Imperial, the book, is as strange and confounding as the empire it describes. Actually, “describe” is nowhere near the right word. This is not a book that immerses you in the sights and smells of an imagined country. Kalpa is elusive, its details precise and specific and its story as a whole impossibly vague. The more Gorodischer tells you about it, the more it seems to escape your grasp. Reading this book is like trying to remember a continually unspooling dream, one without beginning or end.
For all the names and places in it, I don’t think a single one ever recurs in a later chapter, or at least if they did, I didn’t notice. This book is a tremendous work of world creation, but it does almost no world-building. Gorodischer almost perversely resists letting us see a whole picture. Its continuity is as fragmented as that of its endless series of doomed rulers and broken dynasties.
This slowed down the experience of reading Kalpa for me. There is so much new on every page: new royal lineages, new cities, new wars, new legends. The brain resists so much novelty—where to put all the pieces Gorodischer keeps handing us? But I didn’t feel like I was expected to connect any dots, to keep any histories in order, to solve any grand riddles or puzzles hidden in its pages. It was kind of freeing after a point, realizing I didn’t have to remember anything, that I could just stay suspended in the book’s eternal present. So what if I forgot the name of an emperor, the story of his assassination, the city he was born in? So would history, soon enough.
As I read, I kept jotting down various sentences, all aphoristic in their way, that evoked something in me, a sense of familiarity.
“Gold is sweet in the purse, but bitter in the blood.”
“Words, being daughters of the flesh, spoil if they’re kept locked up.”
“The worst thing about sorrow is that it’s blind, and the worst thing about anger is that it sees too much.”
And then I realized what they reminded me of: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books. This is a series so precious to me that I refuse to finish reading it. (I do this sometimes; there is a book by a dear friend of mine who passed away almost 20 years ago that I still haven’t let myself get to the end of, in the hopes of keeping him suspended in my imagination .) One of the many things I love about these books is how the prose never feels like fantasy; if anything, they read like new translations of ancient myths, proverbs and parables.
From my favourite Earthsea novel, The Tombs of Atuan:
“The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”
“I was dying of thirst when you gave me water, yet it was not the water alone that saved me. It was the strength of the hands that gave it.”
“Most things grow old and perish, as the centuries go on and on. Very few are the precious things that remain precious, or the tales that are still told.”
Of course—it was the Le Guin translation of Kalpa Imperial I was reading. It’s one of the few works she translated in her long and illustrious career, the other being the Tao Te Ching (speaking of ancient knowledge), the other being books of poetry. I don’t know why she chose to take on Gorodischer, but there could not be a more perfect fit between author and translator.
In our second installment of this series, I dug up an interview from 1989 in which the links between the imagined world of Kalpa and the reality of life in Argentina were made fairly manifest, even if, to an ignorant onlooker, this would not appear to be a specifically politically “engaged” novel. This makes Le Guin an even more apt choice as translator.
From Kalpa’s eighth chapter, “The Pool:”
I had to explain to her that a storyteller is something more than a man who recounts things for the pleasure and instruction of the crowd. I had to tell her that a storyteller obeys certain rules and accepts certain ways of living that aren’t laid out in any treatise but that are as important or more important than the words he uses to make his sentences. And I told her that no storyteller ever bows down to power, and I would not.
How could these words have been delivered to us in English from anyone else but the woman who famously wrote, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”1
Though the cities and plains and jungles of Kalpa have receded like a dream and don’t live in my head the way other imaginary places do, there are yet descriptions I still think about.
A street that winds now up, now down, ends abruptly in a widow’s garden; a marketplace opens into a temple, and the cry of the seller of copper pots blends with the chants of the priest; the windows of a hospital ward for the dying open onto an ex-convict’s grog shop; the druggist has to cross the library of the Association of Master Stevedores in order to take a bath; a curly palm growing in the office of a justice of the peace reaches outside the building through a gap in the stonework.
Last month I was in Barcelona. I had this idea that while I was there I might pick up a Spanish-language edition of Kalpa, that it would make a nice souvenir. I decided to check out a science fiction/fantasy bookstore called Gigamesh (remember that name) that I found on Google Maps, which seemed to be well-regarded and have a good selection.
I walked there one Friday evening in quite a lot of pain. The nerve trouble that had been bothering me all fall was acting up; an invisible weight hanging from my left hand pulled down at my arm painfully. Still, I persevered. Finally, I got to the bookstore just as the sun was going down.
The place was packed with some sort of literary gathering. I felt out of place, so I tried to just scan the bookshelves and keep a low profile. For the life of me, though, I couldn’t figure out the store’s shelving system; the sections were titled with cryptic quotes from books, and my pain-addled brain could not follow the underlying logic. I didn’t feel up to trying out my rudimentary Spanish on any of the crowd. And besides, they probably didn’t even carry Kalpa, I mean, you could call it fantasy but it might be too “literary” for a genre bookstore. I left.
Later, on returning, I picked up my copy and idly glanced at the blurbs on the back cover.
And just in case you missed the quote’s attribution:
🤦♂️
I love when works of art crack open and allow the outside world to rush in for a moment. A while ago I wrote about the temporal disruptions in PJ Harvey’s album Let England Shake and Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell. Fleeting moments when the mist of the past evaporates and we find ourselves back in the present.
There are no overt references to the world outside Kalpa Imperial until the book’s final chapter. And then, briefly, we can see our own world through a crack.
A caravan is making its way through the desert, and, pestered by an overactive child, the group’s navigator Z’Ydagg tells the group their world’s creation story. There is something off about this mythology—houses with names like Saloon and the charge of the light brigade. Ships with names like Marlenditrij, Betedeivis and Avagarner. Who are Orsonuéls and Clargueible, acting out the siege of Troy with a wooden bear instead of a horse? Why is there a powerful witch named Monalisa? The names are all familiar, the stories a jumble of our mythologies, both ancient and Hollywood.
The science fiction answer would be that that this story is actually set in the far future, where storytellers only dimly remember their—our—past. I don’t like that explanation.
I prefer to think of Kalpa as a place that dreams of us in the same way we dream of it. All we have is scraps of its past, its mythologies, unreliably recounted by a nameless storyteller. At the same time, somewhere, Kalpans are telling stories of us, stories that confuse and beguile them and which all sound very much made up.
“Why are there so many sick people?”
“Because it’s easier to get sick than to look for one’s right place in the world.”
“Explain, explain.”
“Yes,” said the doctor. “We keep adding needless things, false things to ourselves, till we can’t see ourselves and forget what our true shape is. And if we’ve forgotten what shape we are, how can we find the right place to be? And who dares pull away the falsities that are stuck to his eyelids, his fingernails, his heels? So then something goes wrong in the house and in the world, and we get sick.”
“Ah.” said she. “Like the caloco fruit, that has five rinds.”
“Yes.”
“And we all have false things stuck to us?”
“Almost all.”
They sat silent a while.
“What's serious isn't having them,” said the doctor. “What's serious is loving them.”
Thank you for being part of our third go-’round here at Barely a Book Club. I hope you’ll be so generous as to share your own thoughts and dreams in the comments below.
And I have a few announcements. One is to keep your eye on your inbox as I have a special holiday treat planned for you. I can say no more until hopefully a little later this week.
The other is our next book: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, a return to more literal-minded travel writing. It tells the story of the author’s 1933 journey on foot from the Netherlands to what was then Constantinople. I have it on good authority that within New York Review Books (who publish a very nice edition), this is spoken of as “a CHRISTMAS book,” so I think it will suit the holiday season well if we get started right away. Please try and find it at an independent bookstore, brick and mortar (preferred) or otherwise.
Thank you for reading Barely a Book Club. If you don’t already, you can subscribe below, and if you’re not reading the mothership newsletter Something Good, you should go and do that too.
See you soon.
1 "A cat is never on the side of power.” — fellow Something Good patron saint Chris Marker.