We have before us this week the first authorized translation of the long and long-acclaimed Portuguese masterpiece Stamp Your Feet! by Juan Luis Obregon. Although Obregon was a contemporary, and most likely an acquaintance, of such literary lions as Joyce, Hemingway, and Stein, he has remained in relative obscurity outside his native land. Until recently only two of Obregon's works have been available in English: the early pornographic love poem "Ode to a Thighchilada," and the puzzling yet often anthologized short story "Gherkin," a surreal tour de force that takes place entirely under brine and which Ford Maddox Ford accused of being "no more than a distended pickling recipe."
Like so many artistic figures of the twentieth century, Obregon lived in Paris throughout much of the 1920s. Yet early on he became known as a loner and eccentric, and seldom was he invited to the more influential salons. In one account he is described as "a small dark man with a fiendish chuckle who affected half a mustache, sometimes on the left side of his face, more often on the right." Another casts him as "barrel-chested, a fantastic drinker and womanizer, prone to unreasoning fits of temper." This last point is substantiated by Paris Police reports for 1927. In April of that year Obregon was arrested on the banks of the Seine while trying to drown a rag picker who had insulted his necktie.
Oddly enough, Obregon's only publications during this time were not as a creative writer, but as a critic for the short-lived art weekly Le Bidet Bouillonne Partout, where he was best remembered for his classic pronouncement, "Dada ... c'est caca!" which earned him more than a few enemies and once again showed his tendency to swim against prevailing currents.
By 1930 the bubble had burst, the axe had fallen, the pigeons had come home to roost ... in short, the Great Depression was in full swing and most expatriates had repatriated, some, such as Hemingway, returning home to increasing fame and fortune. This was not to be the case for Obregon. Portugal remained a relatively backward country, in large part illiterate. Although "Gherkin" and the apparently untranslatable "Stuffed Chile" had already established his reputation among a select coterie of his fellow literati, financial support was not forthcoming. Obregon wandered the streets of Lisbon, destitute and in increasingly poor health. Finally he was forced to take a job as a coat tree in a local tavern.
Despite such difficulties, indications are that the writer was mellowing with age. His moustache was now complete and in his only surviving letter, written to his mother, he states: "At last I have found gainful employment, and although it may be below what I consider my just station in life, at least I am serving my fellow man. Send me some paella, if you please."
Obregon's new calling was to be a brief one. In March of 1934, only a few weeks after the final pages of Stamp Your Feet! had been penned, a premature spring struck the streets of Lisbon. In the space of one afternoon the weather turned unseasonably warm, and Obregon, still loyally at his post, was suffocated by an abandoned overcoat. Yet his masterpiece lives on.
Like so many great novels of the twentieth century -- Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, Bushwacker's Reprise -- the central obsession of Stamp Your Feet! is with the nature of time. Time to go to work. Time for dinner. Time to go to bed. Time to get up in the morning. We follow the protagonist, Manual Emanual, through twenty-seven-and-a-half days of his life as a bricklayer building public lavatories for a soccer stadium on the outskirts of Madrid. The fact that Obregon had never been to Madrid is further testimony to the range of his vision. As each brick is laid in place a whole new reality, both internal and external, unfolds before us.
In the first section of the book, Obregon amply demonstrates why in some quarters he has earned the appellation "Master of the Gerundive."
" ... carrying the trowel, laying the mortar, taking a smoke, eating a box lunch, taking a smoke, riding the trolley, spitting in the street, avoiding the irate landlady, paying the gas bill, killing a cockroach, masturbating, going to sleep ... "
And so it goes, page upon page, chapter after chapter, of accelerating verbal pyrotechnics, until in the closing scene of Part One, Manual is struck upon the head by an improperly secured washbasin and lapses into a coma for the remainder of the narrative.
In Part Two, Obregon evolved a new and radical literary form to portray the comatose state, a form later dubbed "stream of unconsciousness." Note that this preceded the publication of Ulysses and was a good thirty years before William Burroughs' so-called discovery of the cut-up method. Shredding fourteen newspapers with his bare hands, and covering himself with flour and water, Obregon rolled about on the floor, placing words upon the page in the same order in which they stuck to his body. The result, needless to say, is more than flat bread. Yet you must dive into this immense and sometimes disturbing novel for yourself if you hope to truly sample its flavor.
Though the translation leaves something to be desired, at times slipping back into Portuguese, we recommend Stamp Your Feet! to serious students of twentieth century literature and all inveterate insomniacs.
Published clothbound by Callipygian Press, 843 pages, $39.95. Paperback rights are up for grabs. Yet as Obregon himself warns us in "Ode to a Thighchilada" -- "Don't you go grabbing/ more than you can swallow."
Bruce Boston's dystopian novel The Guardener's Tale (Sam's Dot, 2007) was a Bram Stoker Award Finalist and a Prometheus Award Nominee.
From the author:
"Sunday Review" is a send-up of pretentious book reviews and the lionizing of literary figures from the past.
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