For most of 2020, I passed the pandemic alone in my studio apartment. I turned 33, then 34, and my body seemed to grow old without bringing my spirit along with it. My right knee was clearly deteriorating — I couldn’t sit cross-legged at my desk the way I used to — and because I wasn’t wearing makeup, I could track each age spot as it bloomed to the surface. When I pulled my hair back in a tight ponytail, I could see a patch of scalp. But in that same period had my life evolved at all? Had I met anyone? Surprised myself? Stemmed the tide of collective crisis? My mother often urged me to dance, just a little, by myself in the kitchen — “It’s good medicine,” she said, “despojo.”
I’ve never known what “despojo” means, precisely, though it’s a word I use with some frequency to express a physical craving for spiritual catharsis: “Necesitamos despojo, quiero despojarme.” Or, watching a friend gain momentum on the dance floor and begin to enter a self-forgetful trance: “Esoooo! Des-po-jo!” My Spanish-English dictionary has only the verb (to despoil, to shed leaves) and the plural noun (the spoils of war, mortal remains, rubble, waste). Google Translate: dispossession.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that ebooks are awful. I hate them, but I don’t know why I hate them. Maybe it’s snobbery. Perhaps, despite my long career in technology and media, I’m a secret Luddite. Maybe I can’t stand the idea of looking at books as computers after a long day of looking at computers as computers. I don’t know, except for knowing that ebooks are awful.
The American critic Malcolm Cowley summed up the German writer Thomas Mann’s fiction as “intricate formal structure” taken to its limit. Mann himself, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929, called his craftsmanship “thoroughgoing.” He packed so much physical detail and psychological acuity into his novels that some readers shy away from such strapping productions as “Buddenbrooks,” “The Magic Mountain” and “Doctor Faustus,” let alone the four-volume “Joseph and His Brothers.”
Against this background, the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín has managed to write an incisive and witty novel that shows what good company the Nobelist and his family might have been.