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Episode 13: "Chronicle of the Murdered House" by Lucio Cardoso, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson
101 Plays1 year ago
And we’re back! Welcome to Season Two of Lost in Redonda. We kick things off with a backlist conversation on Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, published by Open Letter Books. It’s probably one of the fastest moving 600 page sagas of a Brazilian family you’re likely to encounter. And it’s funny. And gothic. And very campy.
Our big project this season is a complete reading of the novels of Muriel Spark. That kicks off next week with her debut, The Comforters, available from New Directions, and, folks!, it’s absolutely incredible. We’ve already recorded a couple of the Spark episodes and are we ever excited. (Her last name of course being the inspiration for this season’s music.)
We’re trying to keep some spoilers out of our conversations this season (or at least flag them when they happen), so: around the 61 minute mark we start chatting about one of the more profound moments at the end of the novel. If you haven’t yet read Chronicle and would rather not hear this bit, skip ahead to 1:06.25 or so where we chat about other works that, to us anyway, resonate with this one.
Click here for Lori’s (great!) article on Chronicle in Full Stop.
Titles discussed:
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
The House of Mist by María Luisa Bombal
Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner
And click here to subscribe to our Substack and do follow us on the socials, @lostinredonda across most apps (Twitter and Instagram for now; we’re coming for you eventually #booktok).
Music: “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys” by Traffic
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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Transcript
Introduction to Season 2
00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. And I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda.
00:00:20
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to season two of Lost in Redonda.
Seasonal Focus on Muriel Spark
00:00:25
Speaker
As you heard from the introduction, I'm Tom Flynn. But with me, as always, is Lori Feathers. Hi, Lori. Hi, Tom. I'm excited about season two.
00:00:35
Speaker
I am too. I don't think when we first came up with this that we had any idea that there would be like a seasonal format to it, but with the kind of project idea that we're dealing with Javier Marias' work in the first season now. And now what we're doing next, it kind of makes sense that it has that little bit of a structure that format to it, I think.
00:00:58
Speaker
Yeah, and as as with season one, we're going to be breaking up our deep look into the work of one author with some backlist episodes as well. Yeah. And for this season, we will be diving into the work of Muriel Spark, a writer whom I've not really read any of at all. I'm not sure that you've read it very much of her either, right, Laurie?
00:01:25
Speaker
I've only read The Prime of Miss Jean Brody. I led a book club discussion on that. I love that book. It's so good. And I can't wait till we get to it. But I'm also looking forward just to reading everything else. She wrote a lot of novels. They're shortish novels, but it's still an impressive body of work. And since this is a writer that neither one of us has a ton of background in, I think it'll be
00:01:51
Speaker
And it'll be interesting. It'll be a different kind of deep dive from the first season with us both with the exception of the prime. I'm just going to call it that, the prime. I think that's a good shorthand for it.
00:02:04
Speaker
Other than that, we'll both be coming in fresh to each one. So we'll have the kind of basic first few episodes scheduled posted on the substack and across social media. But we'll be handling MuralSpark's work chronologically by publications. So no larger theme to it.
00:02:26
Speaker
These are the important ones. These are the lesser novels. We're just going to kind of take them at least at the outset. We changed our minds with how we approached Maria's Midway Midstream in the first season. So maybe that'll happen again here. So no promises there. But at the outset, our plan is to to attack her body of work by by publication order. We have been known to switch horses in Midstream, but that is our intent right now just to do it.
00:02:56
Speaker
chronologically, book by book by book. Yeah. I mean, it is rather our podcast, so we can kind of do what we want on that front. Whatever's keeping us happy. This is probably best for the podcast overall. But kicking off this season, we are starting off with a backless pick.
Exploring 'Chronicle of the Murdered House'
00:03:16
Speaker
And today we are talking about, and this is Laurie's suggestion,
00:03:22
Speaker
Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso, translated by Margaret Joel Costa and Robin Patterson, and published in the US by Open Letter Books. So Laurie, kind of like with the Marie NDA book, what the hell is this novel? My god.
00:03:44
Speaker
This novel, though, it has, I think, a shock factor, reminiscent of Marie and I. But it's very straightforward. There's not a lot of ambiguity and kind of like what's true, what's imagined. I mean, there is some of that because we have some pretty unreliable types in the
00:04:09
Speaker
in the story, but it's basically taken from the point of view of someone who's gone back years later and wants to document what happened to this once great country house in Brazil.
00:04:28
Speaker
And so just starts going through diaries, taking reports from people who interacted with the family, different witnesses, and it's just kind of compiling or trying to compile. I would say the contamination, spoilization, rot, and total destruction of a house and a family. Yeah, that's a rather succinct way of putting it.
00:04:57
Speaker
podcast episode over. It's a really wild novel, I find. It has so many of the hallmarks of a melodrama or a soap opera to it with
00:05:16
Speaker
family members hating each other, the one reclusive brother who no one speaks of and largely disappears for, I mean, he's gone for like, what 300 400 pages in the novel, we meet him relatively early on.
Melodrama and Family Conflicts
00:05:31
Speaker
he emerges briefly once again, and then he's just gone until the end, but plays such a fantastic role in how all this resolves itself as much as there is any resolution. But yeah, the one brother marries a woman that he brings in that no one approves of, but is it really disapproval or is it something else? And there's lots of sex and lots of very weird sex. And it
00:05:59
Speaker
It's a lot. It's a lot, a lot, a lot. I mean, it's it's funny. There's a way which is almost like maximalist in like how over the top it is. But there is such a control and a restraint in the pros. I mean, it's beautifully written. But you get the feeling that Cardoso, if he'd wanted to, could have gone could have pushed this into some like even more extreme places with just how he could have written it.
00:06:28
Speaker
I think it was meant to be a bit funny. In the introduction, Benjamin Moser talks about it being campy. I think he calls it campy in the same time he's talking about it being a little bit echo of Faulkner
00:06:51
Speaker
And so there's all of these very Gothic, a lot of heavy religious sin and redemption and all of those kind of things that can make a really kind of creepy old house, even creepier. And so we've got that.
00:07:15
Speaker
It is exaggerated to such an extent that I think it was meant to, he was having a little fun with us, I think, Lucia Cardoza. And I think you're absolutely right. It's the language that saves it. I mean, it feels so over the top, but yet it's so
00:07:39
Speaker
beautifully written and so descriptive. And I think the characters are really well drawn. The emotions feel real so that you're not just snickering and giggling the whole time. I mean, you really, it's a page turner.
00:07:57
Speaker
Oh, yeah. I mean, it has incredible momentum to it. It flies. A lot of the characters feel like it's just a pouring forth of their thoughts, their emotions. So and it just it whisks you right along with them from point to point almost almost to the point where you have to kind of slow yourself down. I always I had to slow myself down to make sure that I wasn't totally
00:08:22
Speaker
accepting every single thing they said. I mean, I don't think that too many of the characters lie at any point, but there is definitely withholding that takes place throughout and some pretty important facts are withheld until the very end. Yeah, it's also, I mean, just on the topic of like how it's the writing itself. I mean, as you said, it's someone going back and collecting all these documents, but they're all
00:08:51
Speaker
told from a first-person perspective, but just from different folks associated, members of the family, people from town, the local priest, the local doctor, the local pharmacist. And each one has such a distinct voice and such a distinct way of presenting themselves. The doctor sounds like an old country doctor, someone who'd been
00:09:12
Speaker
who had been tending to the people in this area from, you know, the lowliest hand at the farm all the way up to the folks at this estate when they deigned to call upon him. And he has just such an old fashioned stilted way of presenting himself and presenting his tale versus the pharmacist who's a little bit who is more transactional and more sort of like of the
00:09:37
Speaker
of the moment in time. His commentary always reflects back on what's going on in the world. You almost get the sense that he's always seeing the worst things that are happening and preparing for it, which often leads to him having the exact thing that another character needs at a particular moment in time.
Character Dynamics and Obsessions
00:09:56
Speaker
I think that the one person that we don't hear from in this book that I would have loved
00:10:03
Speaker
to hear him talk about this family. But he plays a kind of overshadowing role in the book is the Baron, who is this guy from Portuguese royalty that lives in the town. And the one brother in particular, Demetrio, is very
00:10:26
Speaker
Keene on trying to impress the Baron and always wants the Baron to you know come by the house and to to socialize and he wants he wants the Baron to kind of
00:10:42
Speaker
I think give him give him in the house like the improper in like the the import that he he feels that they deserve but the Baron is just elusive and doesn't really I think apparently want much if anything to do with this very weird family that
00:11:04
Speaker
undercurrent of always preparing for when the Baron will come, and the Baron never comes, or rather, the Baron does come once. But every year, I mean, I just read it, and I'm forgetting exactly what time of year it is. Every year, there's this idea that this would be the time when the Baron would make his visit, and he never arrives.
00:11:22
Speaker
I mean, sort of reflecting on what you were saying about the campiness and some of the humor, and there's absolutely a ton of camp, and it is very funny at times. But that's the sort of like, there's almost a slapsticky element that could have been introduced to the novel a little bit more heavily, Icardo said wanted to, with this constant looming idea of the Baron. But because this family, the Menasies are so
00:11:48
Speaker
broken in very fundamental ways, instead comes across, as you said, as a shadow, as a looming threat. I initially thought you were going to say that the person we don't hear from really is actually the older brother, Demetrio. I think the bearer might have had some interesting things to say about the Menasies and the town in general.
00:12:09
Speaker
But Demetrio and how he functions and how he thinks and how he affects so much of what takes place in his family's life, it would have been interesting to hear how he would have been presented, like what his voice would have sounded like. So should I kind of try to, in a nutshell, explain for our listeners kind of what's going on here to set the table up for them?
00:12:34
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think this is our usual point about 13 minutes in. We've done the pretties and potentially we did some appetites and now we can get into some of the meat and potatoes. Yeah, we get a little over exuberant sometimes and then it's like, oh yeah, dang, people need to know what this is about.
00:12:55
Speaker
So, the Chronicle of the Murdered House is a place called the Shakara, and it is in the outskirts of this small town in Brazil. And it's home to three grown sons of the late Donna Malvina Meneses.
00:13:15
Speaker
Demetrio, Valdo, and the recluse, Timotillo. Demetrio, who's the eldest, manages what little remains of the family's fortune alongside his wife, Anna, with whom he shares a passionless marriage. In contrast to the bland Anna, Valdo's young wife, Nina,
00:13:39
Speaker
who didn't grow up in the area, but he kind of brings her back from a trip to Rio, is a vibrant beauty who owns a hyperactive, romantic imagination. She loves all kinds of fancy things. And this drives Demetria crazy because he's a real penny pincher. And admittedly, the family seems to be falling on hard times.
00:14:04
Speaker
But I think that it's principally the story of Nina and the house that this story kind of talks about. And what I think is really interesting, Tom, is how we see kind of the degradation of both Nina and the house kind of happening simultaneously, would you say?
Nina's Impact and Family Tensions
00:14:29
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, Nina's arrival at the house is something of a
00:14:34
Speaker
I mean, it's a wedge among the folks who live there in many respects.
00:14:40
Speaker
in introducing her, the fallen down nature of the house, that some of the windows don't open properly anymore, that they can't afford to fix the wood, all sorts of elements to that, the pasture land that they have, they have to rent out, but they can't even rent out most of it because it's dry and barren and nothing can grow there any longer. That seems to be brought into sharper relief among
00:15:09
Speaker
the members of the Menasies clan who all seem to have this idea of like who they are and what it means to be a Menasies and what it means as far as Demetrio is concerned and kind of what he enforces upon the others largely is to be reserved, to be removed, and to really be fundamentally cut off from the rest of the world. They are supposed to be separate on their hill looking down upon everyone else. And I mean, there are points where the doctor reflects on
00:15:38
Speaker
what that family, the menzies has meant to the town and kind of gives them a time suggests that he's giving them some slack for some of their behavior because of how important they've been. Um, while others clearly, I mean, the pharmacist in particular exemplifies sort of a, a newer younger person in town who just sees them as hottie and, you know, weird, very weird.
00:16:04
Speaker
It's the rigidity in many respects that I think and that cut off nature that in many ways proves to be their downfall. They can't think of ways to expand or just maintain their fortune. They can't think of ways to be a part of the world. And interestingly, it's the the local priest who kind of most explicitly reflects on that as the novel moves along.
00:16:31
Speaker
Going back kind of to the beginning, one of my favorite scenes is when Nina arrives, newly married. She marries Waldo sight unseen. She's never been to where the house is, but Waldo arrives after the wedding to the house before Nina.
00:16:54
Speaker
And Nina is delayed and comes a few days later and she really acts like she's been sold a bill of goods. I think that she's heard stories from Baldo about this old grand family that he's part of.
00:17:12
Speaker
and this manor house that they own and the respect they have of the community. And she gets there and first of all, she's never lived outside of a city before.
00:17:30
Speaker
And so she finds, even when she gets off the train in town, that it's dusty, it's boring, the people are not attractive, they're unglamorous. And then she comes to the house itself and sees pretty instantly that things are pretty austere and not at all what she imagined her life was going to be like living in this house.
00:17:59
Speaker
Yeah, they have a dinner, Valdo, Nina, Anna, and Demetrio.
00:18:07
Speaker
cruelly goes to some pains to say that they don't have money, that the house is falling apart, that where you promised riches and wealth and land because we don't really have any of those things. And Valdo tries to argue back against it. I mean, Demetrio is very austere. I mean, let's use the word austere. He is severe. He is humorless. He is just
00:18:37
Speaker
barely a person. He is so at such hard angles, it feels like. Valdo has some of that in him, but also certainly like he sees this beautiful woman and convinces her to marry him so quickly and tells her all about this wonderful place they're gonna live in. There's still a little bit of the romantic in in him. And it's as the novel moves along,
00:19:02
Speaker
There are ways in which it feels like Valdo becomes even more both those things, much more serious, but at the same time has an inner emotional life that it's very much suggested Demetrio might not have.
00:19:17
Speaker
Yeah, the circumstances of Dimitrios marriage to his wife Anna are so messed up. Yeah, I think he picks her out from the village when she's like five years old or something. And she tells the parent he tells the parents, you know,
00:19:35
Speaker
When your daughter comes of age, I'm going to marry her." And then she grows up knowing that, oh, I'm just being, you know, I'm just kind of being groomed to be Demetrio's wife. And she's a very, at least until we get to know her a little bit, much further in the book, she just seems like
00:20:00
Speaker
I don't know, like that old that the woman in the Norman Rockwell painting or something like just very dour and and mad and mean, but totally like unemotive. I mean, I think even at the outset, she is doesn't even come across as mad or mean. She's just sort of in the background like she just isn't she is not a character as such. And as the novel moves along and we get, you know, much more of
00:20:29
Speaker
her take and her involvement in the action of the tale. She is far, far from a background character.
00:20:39
Speaker
Yeah, but also I think the fact that she shows zero warmth toward Nina. Well, they just they they describe that she I mean that while not having been born in Menasies, by the time Nina gets there, Anna is a Menasies. She is rigid. She is reserved. She has no seemingly no interest in the outside world. She has I mean, it almost suggests that she could almost be their sister as much as she is Demetrios wife.
00:21:09
Speaker
which sounds like an awful way to live in a marriage, I would think, but there we are.
00:21:18
Speaker
I wrote an article about this book at one time and I described Demetrio's kind of choosing Anna like someone choosing an unripe banana knowing that eventually it would be ripe and serve as a perfectly serviceable but very boring snack. It's kind of like the way he picks Anna.
00:21:46
Speaker
I'm putting that I was I was really going to put that into the show notes. But yeah, that's from a review you wrote from full stop, which I found when I was doing a little bit of searching online. And Lori, that is literally word for word what you wrote in that article. So well done. I mean, it's it's incredibly apt, but good memory for what you wrote back in 2017.
00:22:14
Speaker
Yeah, I usually can't pull something like the banana out like I did on that one. But yeah, it's really kind of gross, the way he just chooses her as the wife and she just kind of dutifully assumes the role. Well, I think also that grossness is also sort of at the root of
00:22:37
Speaker
what's wrong with this house and what's wrong with this family is that it's things are done in such a manner, like complete, like unfeeling, unthinking of what the other person might want or, you know, what Anna's aspirations could have been had she not been, you know, designated from the time that she could, you know, she was a kindergartener and her future was selected for her. Right. I mean, that's just that is at
00:23:06
Speaker
Yeah, that is at the core of what is harming this family and the people that come into contact with it and what Nina upsets so incredibly by her arrival, by her presence, and in some ways like by her beauty. I mean, everyone states outright that she is perhaps the most beautiful person they have ever seen in their lives. It's not that she's especially good-looking.
00:23:35
Speaker
a shock to the system, and she's absolutely a shock to the household and the family system that exists at Chikara. Why don't we talk about Timitillo? Because Anna kind of, he's locked up in his room.
00:23:56
Speaker
Uh, secluded, Timothee is a cross dresser and seen as totally abhorrent and aberrant by his other brothers. And so they just won't have anything to do with him, but he makes it clear to Betty, um, the housekeeper that he really wants to meet Anna to talk to Anna and she, I'm sorry, to Nina. Yes. Excuse me.
00:24:25
Speaker
And so she complies and goes to meet him pretty early on and they kind of form this weird bond. He's obviously enthralled by her beauty, like the other two brothers, but I kind of think that she maybe feels some, I don't know, camaraderie with him just because
00:24:53
Speaker
She knows that she's going to not fit in here and he certainly seems to not fit in with his brothers. Yeah, she has a conversation with Betty at one point after meeting with Timothee and I mean, Betty's asking like, in some ways kind of suggesting like, well, are you guys friends? And Nina's very ambivalent about that.
00:25:14
Speaker
and basically says like Timothee is mad, you know, and not because he wears his mother's gowns and jewelry, but because he wants to only, the world only exists within his room for him. He is only existing within his particular, like, elliptical bubble, and that's all he's interested in doing.
Unlikely Bond: Nina and Timoteo
00:25:35
Speaker
And so while he may
00:25:37
Speaker
He may be a good person for her to like interact with because he's different from the rest of the clan. I don't think Nina really sees him as someone that offers her much beyond that other than asking him or making a pact with him that if she should be the one to die first, that he would put violets on her coffin because violets were her her favorite flower.
00:26:01
Speaker
Should we introduce Alberto, the gardener? Yeah, I think bringing up the flowers is a good moment to do that. Yeah, absolutely. And this is where this is like soap opera. So we've laid out this stiff, I mean, there's like, this would be like if Downton Abbey had been dropped into Brazil, except that
00:26:25
Speaker
It was a smaller family and there were fewer servants and most of the family were just kind of terrible people more so than maybe some of them were. I don't know, I didn't really actually wash it out in Navi. It's just a reference point that popped into my head at one point. But yeah, so now in the soap opera comes in the sexy gardener, so Alberto.
00:26:46
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know whether I was thinking Downton Abbey or maybe the Addams family, but probably even something much more macabre and disagreeable than the Addams family. Yeah, so Alberto is this young
00:27:03
Speaker
I think 19, 20 year old guy for some reason working as a gardener at this weird house. They've got quite a bit of land and he is one of the people that just becomes, well, I don't know if you could say becomes. I think he's almost instantly captivated by Nina, the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.
00:27:28
Speaker
At one point, he tries to make his feelings known to her. And as he's doing that, Demetria witnesses this potentially intimate moment
00:27:45
Speaker
Nina claims that you know she didn't provoke his advances she didn't know that he was going to kind of get down on bended knee and profess his love for her but Demetrio I don't know whether Demetrio isn't buying it but he he
00:28:04
Speaker
definitely sees that he can use this episode to his advantage, to try to create an even more pronounced wedge between Valdo and Nina. And that's pretty much what it does.
00:28:19
Speaker
It's stated a little bit more explicitly towards the end of the novel, but it's very clear, almost from the beginning, that Demetria wants her gone. Whatever it takes, she needs to no longer be there. And the various whys of that are discussed by different characters.
00:28:36
Speaker
It's tricky. This is a tricky one to get into because of sort of the soap operatic melodramatic just wildness of what takes place throughout it. But there are a lot of deceits and half truths that slowly unveil themselves until you have a very full picture of it in about the last 50 years.
00:28:59
Speaker
I mean, it's almost a 600 page book, and in the last 50 pages, the amount of denouement that takes place, I felt shell shocked afterwards with how many facts and truths were brought to light all in that span. Having already raced through 550 some odd pages to then get hit with that was a lot.
00:29:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think you read it really fast, which is a testament to what a page chart. No, I mean, I flew through it. It's it's funny having read so much. Having read the Marius before, I could actually get through some of the novels a little bit faster because I just had a general sense of what was doing in the rhythm of his writing. When I first read any of his books, I couldn't. And some of the other sort of books we read, I just you know, I don't feel like
00:29:47
Speaker
You could fly through them. This one was just a sprint, which was great and very heady and had quite the high associated with it when I would tear myself away to go make dinner or what have you.
00:30:01
Speaker
It definitely, it definitely created quite this, quite the state. Um, but yeah, so Alberto, Alberto is seen, declares apparently either declaring his love or that they, but to Demetri's eyes, it was reciprocated. Like he felt that Nina was, he, that Alberto was on bent knee saying how much he loved her and he was, and she was not rejecting him and that even
00:30:26
Speaker
To Demetrio's mind, even to be in that position is a disgrace. Like she shouldn't even have been in the garden alone with a gardener in the first place. Like that's not a place. She should be inside the house with all the windows closed. Like the rest of them slowly. Like Anna slowly fading into the wallpaper until you become the wallpaper itself.
00:30:45
Speaker
Um, this is why Timotheo is so offensive to him. It's not, it's not just that he, you know, that he wears their mom's clothes and all that. It's that he doesn't fit what he thinks, uh, a Menasies should be. And maybe also because Demetrio himself doesn't, doesn't actually fit when the Menasies perhaps should be.
00:31:05
Speaker
Well, I guess when you were talking about why Demetrio wants Nina gone, I can think of like three possible reasons off the top of my head.
00:31:18
Speaker
he's immensely attracted to her and he's afraid of his feelings. Two, he's afraid she's going to like spend through whatever money, little money that they still have left. And three, I think is what you're getting at. And that's the sense that I get as well. It's that she has disrupted this
00:31:36
Speaker
tranquil what Demetria would think is equilibrium of the place. Nothing is ever supposed to change at this place. It's kind of like they're living in a tomb or a sarcophagus or a vault. And they're just biding their time until they die. And they're not supposed to lead interesting lives
00:32:03
Speaker
They're not supposed to become attached to people. They're not supposed to take interest in their community or let the community share their lives with them. They're just entombed in this house. I think one big thing of the book is that that kind of entombment is what brings them down.
00:32:31
Speaker
I think you're absolutely right. Their role in Demetrios' mind is to be a monument, a monument to what it is to be a menasies.
00:32:40
Speaker
her presence, her interest. And also, frankly, I mean, he says at one point that Dimitriou that I think at the same dinner where he lays out some of the facts of the case to Nina, that they're supposed to be the last in his mind, they're the last generation of menasies, there aren't supposed to be any. This is it. This is the end of the line. The family should not will not continue after this. And her presence also is a bit of a threat, because
00:33:07
Speaker
It seems pretty obvious that he and Anna will never have children. But what if Nina and Valda do? What if the family line continues? What does that what does that then mean to their finances, to their status as a monument? The idea of a child running through the halls of that, as you put it, tomb is is strange, is a worrisome, a worrisome consideration. And Nina gets pregnant.
00:33:37
Speaker
Nina gets pregnant and it's the way that the various chapters are told from different perspectives as letters, as reports, as memoirs.
00:33:54
Speaker
kind of plays with the time a little bit and how things are related back. Someone else's involvement in a scene that we hadn't seen previously, layers on top, some of the action, the motion of it.
00:34:12
Speaker
Alberto's declaration of love that Demetrio witnesses is while Nina is pregnant. And among the many effects of this are that eventually Valdo attempts suicide, shoots himself and barely misses his heart. And while he's recuperating Nina leaves, she's
00:34:34
Speaker
She'd made noise about leaving previously, but at this point she is done, and she takes off for Rio, leaving everyone else behind, but while still pregnant with the next generation of Menasies.
00:34:49
Speaker
And within the motion of the novel, Anna is the one that goes to find her to bring her back, but instead comes back only with a boy, a baby boy whom
00:35:05
Speaker
Nina had named, the boy's name was supposed to be Alberto after the father of Dimitri Alvaldo and Timoteo, but instead comes back with a boy that Nina named Andre. And Nina stays away for 15 years after that.
00:35:21
Speaker
Yeah, why do you think Demetrio allowed Nina to go fetch the baby? Because there is some intimation that he felt threatened because Baudo was going to have an heir and Demetrio was not. By law or by custom.
00:35:40
Speaker
the heir is actually the one that would be in charge. So while he is in charge as the older brother, once the heirs of age, he would displace Demetrio. Yeah. I think it's in some ways laid out in the early going as something that he feels that Valdo almost needs or Valdo works on him about.
00:36:03
Speaker
I mean, I think also we want to get into like how Demetrios sees the world. The idea of a Menasies out in the world not being raised as a Menasies is probably as much as he doesn't want the kid to exist. The kid exists. So it'd be rather anathema to him to have a Menasies be anything other than what he thinks a Menasies ought to be.
00:36:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think I think that's probably I mean, Demetrio is someone who's so thoroughly who is so mixed up. Ultimately, he has these ideas of who he's supposed to be or what his family is supposed to be. But they're not that because they can't afford to be that thing anymore.
Andre's Transformation and Isolation
00:36:40
Speaker
So instead, he's decided that they should just sort of
00:36:45
Speaker
they should just sort of fade away. But that, but that runs crossways to the idea of being a family in the first place. And I think that's also playing and praying upon him. He's just
00:36:58
Speaker
There are a lot of very interesting characters in this novel. There are a lot of very odd and odd people making questionable choices. Demetrios is probably the most broken of all the characters in the novel. He's by the end described by his brother as being a shriveled shadow. He barely appears human by the end of the novel.
00:37:24
Speaker
And I think we can get into this because this is how the novel opens with Nina's death. And the first people we really meet are Nina and Andre. And there's some ambivalence somewhat for the first, I don't know, five pages. But it's very much intimated that Nina is dying, but that she and Andre were lovers. And that's how it starts. And then it takes this kind of
00:37:51
Speaker
It takes us back to the beginning to how how we get to this point Yeah, there's not a lot of easing us into incest. It's just kind of there from from the jump, but Yeah, I guess maybe we should say a little bit about what Nina's been up to for 15 years while Andre's been growing up in the tomb and She's been basically
00:38:18
Speaker
living off the charity of her father's friend, the Colonel. And we hear some reports from the Colonel too in this narrative. But she starts writing to Valdo and she starts saying, you know, I really don't have two pennies to rub together. I'm living in poverty. I need money.
00:38:43
Speaker
and Waldo ignores her, basically. And it's only when she kind of professes to be ill that Waldo, I guess, takes sympathy on her and decides to let her
00:39:03
Speaker
come back. I don't think she ever, unless I'm misremembering, I don't think she ever like professes, I really want to see my son. I've never laid eyes on my son. I miss my son. He's my child. She just wants
00:39:22
Speaker
I thought it was one of the more interesting points of the book is when they talk about her desire to come back because she writes these longish letters to Waldo and she weirdly misses the place it seems after fifteen years now at least that's what she.
00:39:41
Speaker
what she says, whether she's just trying to get back because she can't support herself. But I kind of got the sense that maybe she's romanticized what kind of place this was and what kind of time she had there in the brief one or two years that she lived there before she got run off.
00:40:03
Speaker
Yeah, Valdo reflects on that as well. Talk about how different she is in many respects when she comes back. And I mean, that has been 15 years. They both.
00:40:13
Speaker
They've both grown older, they've changed, they've had different experiences. And Valdo at this point, this is where he seems much more of a person at this point. There's almost something juvenile about how he initially approached being married to Nina and bringing her back. And the fact that he wasn't as upfront or
00:40:34
Speaker
had to elude himself as to the nature of the family's fortunes and in describing them to Nina. But no, he seems much more serious, but
00:40:47
Speaker
in some ways, able to emotionally engage with who Nina is and her return. But when she comes back, he is very sensitive to the fact, and maybe in the way that Demetria was the first time she came there, of how much her presence is changing things. That's mostly because of the change that comes over Andre with his mother's return. Andre seems like a relatively normal kid, all things considered, when we first meet him before Nina's return, or at least
00:41:16
Speaker
as normal as you're going to be growing up in the tomb and them attempting to raise him the way that a men's ease and a manifestation should be raised with some sporting activities and hunting and things of that nature. But very little affection. The only affection that he really gets in his life is from Betty, the housekeeper. He obviously doesn't have
00:41:42
Speaker
any type of relationship with his father, other than the most, you know, kind of formal, basic, very unemotional type of relationship. And it is kind of interesting, you know, he's kind of as you would if, you know, if you were raised by one parent and you knew your other parent was, was out there living life and you never even seen a picture. They had no pictures of Nina.
00:42:12
Speaker
They never talked about Nina at dinner. She was just like a persona non grata. And then out of the blue, Valto tells him that she's coming back because she's very ill. And he asks Andre to go away for two days hunting rather than wait there to meet his mother for the first time at 15 years of age.
00:42:36
Speaker
When Alberto was first introduced, it stated that he was the gardener and he was 19 or so, but that he'd been working on the estate since he was a boy. That basically he'd been dropped off and raised there and raised to be the gardener. That was his role. It's very clear that Betty does not seem to have any life beyond her service to this estate.
00:42:57
Speaker
And in some ways, that's repeating itself with Andre. He's on the estate. You don't get the sense that he goes into town very much, goes to school there or anything of that nature. So you combine the idea of his mother returning. And when she arrives back, she is still just as beautiful as she was when she left. She might be a little bit older. Her illness that eventually kills her
00:43:26
Speaker
is not fully enforced yet. So even then, up until the moment she dies, it doesn't actually strip her for beauty, per se. It's maybe not entirely shocking that a young man raised in isolation would have a lot of mixed up feelings the first time he encounters his mother and for her to be the most beautiful person he's ever seen in the world. I don't know. I'm trying to give Andre a little bit of an out here for what comes next.
00:43:53
Speaker
Yeah, no. And his mother, she totally confuses him, whether intentionally or whether intentionally or not. I mean, she's she's affectionate to him. But I mean, and Andre doesn't know the story about Alberto, the gardener. And so because Alberto, the gardener, I don't know whether we mentioned it, but Alberto, the gardener is no longer working there because he's dead. Right. Sorry, we've missed that part after.
00:44:22
Speaker
I mean, after it's after Nina leaves that Alberto uses the so when when when Nina leaves after Valdo has attempted suicide, she goes and confronts him and almost suggests that he did this in some no small part to try and keep her there, but it's not going to work. And she throws the gun out the window into the garden. And Alberto finds the gun and Alberto kills himself with the same gun that Valdo attempted to kill himself.
00:44:51
Speaker
Yeah, so Alberto's not there any longer. And I'm quite certain that Andre would never have been told about a member of the help killing themselves on the grounds, you know? But yet I think the reader knows that when Nina is kind of like looking at Andre and she's talking to Andre, Andre describes that it felt like
00:45:14
Speaker
She was seeing him but not really seeing him and she was talking past him. She was kind of talking to him but as though
00:45:25
Speaker
She was also thinking about someone else when she was talking. I mean, clearly he is reminding her of Alberto, I think. And so she does inappropriate things, says things, and makes suggestions
00:45:48
Speaker
that are just very weird from the get go with andre and andres had no socialization he doesn't have that.
00:45:59
Speaker
act interactively with anyone, let alone a beautiful woman. And he's 15 years old. And he's totally unequipped to deal with someone who I think you could say is a siren like Nina. Well, and also what does it mean to actually be like to be a mother like within a social context? I mean, he hasn't been raised with a mother. She's she has never been a mother to him any of that. I mean, they're,
00:46:25
Speaker
They're barely a family. I mean, they are the Menasies, but would you actually really think of them as being familial or filial among Demetrio?
00:46:37
Speaker
Valdo and Timoteo, they banished. So family and those sorts of connections mean very little against the weight of what it is to be the monument, the tomb that is the Meneses clan in this falling apart house that they live in. Maybe we should mention how Timoteo has changed in Nina's absence.
00:47:05
Speaker
And what that means. When Nina returns, she does see Timiteo and when she goes into his room and you get the sense that the windows and that the only time the doors open is when food is brought to him or when.
00:47:21
Speaker
He uses his inheritance to give money to the staff to bring him alcohol. He's been drinking himself slowly to death since he's been cast out of the family, though not cast out of the home. Again, probably because he'd meant as he can just be wandering about the world. But when she sees him again,
00:47:42
Speaker
I mean, he's massive. He was already putting on weight when she first met him, and now he's almost inhuman in the way she describes him and the way that he's dressed and the way he moves and just the look in his eyes. Like he's become, I wouldn't say bestial, but there's whatever madness he had or whatever he was.
00:48:06
Speaker
much further down that path than he was the last time she saw him. He's something very, very othered here at this point. So do you think that he's trying to disfigure himself in order to bring further shame on his brothers? I don't know if he can even see himself. Like I think
00:48:27
Speaker
I just get the sense that he's someone who is so removed from the world that it almost doesn't even matter. I'm not even sure of the last time he looked at himself and saw anything other than what he wanted to see in that moment.
00:48:44
Speaker
It's a really, it's a really gross portrait that Cardoza paints of this Timoteo 15 years on. And you know, you can hardly see his eyes because his face is so fat.
00:49:03
Speaker
he can barely move because he's so heavy he's still trying to like squeeze in to his mother's old ball gowns and party dresses and glitter and sparkles and feather boas and things but but really it's just kind of like scraps of those clothes
00:49:24
Speaker
Right, because he gives birth. He's bursting the seams. He wears her necklaces as bracelets because just they wouldn't work as a necklace any longer, but they will fit around his wrist. I mean, it's just there's something. There's something very broken being expressed there, I think, and not and I don't think it's because he is a cross dresser. I don't think it's anything like that. It's much more manifestations of brokenness within him that
00:49:54
Speaker
This is, in some ways, I think it's like a pushback against what this idea, the rigidity of what the Menzies is supposed to be that is taking place there. And it's also just discomfort in his own body. I think we're approaching, and in the first season, we kind of ignored the whole spoiler warning thing.
Father Justino's Perspective
00:50:16
Speaker
I think we're fast approaching the point where we need to get into some spoiler territory.
00:50:21
Speaker
I think before we do that, before we either warn listeners that we're about to tell them some spoilers or we just like pull up short and don't do the spoilers, I'm interested, Tom, because I know that you were a theology student, I think, right? In undergrad? Yeah, I was. And so I'm wondering about how you perceive
00:50:49
Speaker
Father Justino's whole kind of explanation about what's wrong with this family and why this is happening to them. I like Father Justino. He seems very boring in his first couple of misses, I felt, or at least he was
00:51:12
Speaker
And it becomes clear as his reports recur throughout the novel that he's been holding back and he's been holding out. And now as it moves along, he's willing to say more and more and more. But he has a very interesting sense of heaven and hell in no small part because he doesn't necessarily feel that heaven is
00:51:35
Speaker
orderly, or pristine, that it might actually just be raw emotion, it might be passion, it might be all these other, all these things. And those are all the things that the menzies cut themselves off from, that in being rigid, in being caught from the world that
00:51:52
Speaker
That's the sin. The sin there is not that they are pride, or maybe it is to a certain degree a form of pride, but the greater the active part of the sin is that they are not of the world and as humans, as people, they should be part of the world. And in being part of the world, they will fail.
00:52:12
Speaker
they will do wrong, they will make mistakes, but that is part of what they are called to do and then to seek the forgiveness and seek Claire, like seek sucker for those failures for that because they are human and
00:52:30
Speaker
their rigidity, their, their way of being has deprived them of their humanity. And that's probably a far greater sin than a lot of what other folks, including Nina and Andre get up to. Yeah, you know, I think it's a really, I don't know that I've read a novel that kind of
00:52:53
Speaker
looks at sin as being a product of this immutability, that they refuse to let life in, as you said, to
00:53:12
Speaker
to live, to feel emotions, to take some risks, to go out into the world, to really live and therefore their inability to change and their walling themselves off in this house is really the root of their sin and the root of their ungodliness. A lot of
00:53:41
Speaker
his conversation centers around Anna's contribution to the novel. Anna writes letters, writes confessions to Father Justino. And you don't really get the sense that outside of maybe what they're supposed to do as this rich family, that the Menezes are especially religious in any real sense. So Anna reaching out like that,
00:54:10
Speaker
and her sense of God and faith is very complicated. And Father Justino is in some ways, he's at moments left dumbstruck by what she says, but also by what her thought process is, which I don't know.
00:54:31
Speaker
He very much sounds and feels like a parish priest, like a country priest, like someone who is tending ministry to the souls of people whom he very much cares about and is trying to guide them.
00:54:46
Speaker
on their terms as best he can towards what he thinks, what he thinks is the right way to live, is godly, is a way to seek absolution for your sins. But there's a very strong undercurrent rejecting faith throughout the novel, as expressed by a number of, well, both rejecting faith, but also finding faith and grace and beauty in unexpected ways too. I mean, it's
00:55:16
Speaker
This is such an impressive novel. It is such a complete, complete work and world unto itself. It's amazing. Another big question. What do you think about the theory that Nina is the personification of the house? And what does that mean? Because she is an outsider. But we see her, and that opening scene is really
00:55:43
Speaker
kind of powerful, not just because we learn that, oh my God, this is a novel about incest, but because Andre approaches her and holds her and kisses her and she smells like death and she's rotting and she's become a very physically disgusting thing. And the house is kind of
00:56:12
Speaker
the same kind of processes seem to be happening and have been happening over time with the house. So was Nina the downfall of the house or was the house going to fall down anyway? I think it was more a parallelism. I mean, I think her arrival, her arrival made the, um, the end of the Menasies clan as a presence in, in this community.
00:56:42
Speaker
much more apparent, much more visible, much more shocking. But it was going to happen. And in the same way that the house was
00:56:53
Speaker
It was inevitable. And when they find out, when Valda finds out and Nina finds out how sick she is, the doctors who talk to her say, you should have sought treatment sooner. There's nothing to be done. And in many respects, that's what's taking place to this house, to this family. The rot was too deep. There was nothing that you could do to save that house at that point. So I think it's much more of a parallel
00:57:18
Speaker
parallel action, but the pyrotechnics that take place around it would not have been the same, would not have existed had Nina not entered into that sphere. Yeah. And kind of again, going to this scene at her deathbed. She kind of sticks the final nail in the Menendez coffin because her death
00:57:47
Speaker
brings out the entire community, which is exactly what this family has never wanted. There's kind of like this death vigil that happens because she's become such a sensation.
00:57:58
Speaker
in the village, in part because the families lived in such seclusion and kind of has a mystique to it. But they've caught glimpses of Nina coming to and from the train station and she's become kind of like a persona that's like greater than she's
00:58:18
Speaker
She's like a movie star to them almost. And so her death, the irony of it is that, you know, she finally dies. And so maybe you could say that her bad influence on this house to the extent that it was one and on this family has now ended because she's dead. But
00:58:41
Speaker
It's when she dies, the entire village and the surrounding villages come out to like, you know, to kind of just check out the family, check out her body, just to kind of be, I guess, nosy interested neighbors, which the Menendez has tried and succeeded for the most part in keeping everyone out. I mean, it was Demetrios worst nightmare. He was
00:59:10
Speaker
And she died of cancer. And the time frame's, I guess, a little squishy. Not especially. It's clearly the 20th century. There is electricity. There are cars. The book was published in, I think, 1959, 1958. So I guess it may be like the final events are placed maybe 10, 15 years prior to that.
00:59:30
Speaker
But a few characters mention the idea that cancer may or may not be contagious. The doctors aren't totally sure. But Demetrio is convinced they're contagious. So he wants to throw away all of the clothes. And he's gathering up all of the clothes to get rid of them. The body's not even cold. And he's trying to get everything that was Nina out of the house as quickly as possible to the point where Valdo attacks him.
00:59:56
Speaker
punches and slightly beats up his brother, which is in front of other people, like all these things are all these
01:00:04
Speaker
This family for whom they've heard nothing for the longest time, this goddess shows up as if from on high, like just this interruption into the space. Rumors start abounding about what's taking place. Suddenly they're the talk of the town in a way they probably haven't been in a generation or two. And then as she dies, they see up close this family and this house that they haven't seen in so long and how
01:00:34
Speaker
how empty and broken it is. Yeah, it's a hell of an ending. So there's a real twist to the ending, and I'm not sure we should give it away, Tom. What do you think? There's one element I do want to give away. OK. And that's Timatao. And why Nina meant so much to him and what she offered his life. Because I think that's one of the
01:01:02
Speaker
redemptive qualities to this novel, or at least to the characters in this novel. God, we need some redemption. So go for it. Okay, so a little bit of a spoiler. So if you want to get through the full 591 pages and before you hear this part, by all means, but
01:01:25
Speaker
Nina does have an affair with Alberto. That's not really a big spoiler that's established about a path two-thirds of the way through that that did take place.
01:01:39
Speaker
One of the more moving elements of this novel for me is that at Nina's funeral, Tim Mateo leaves his room for the first time in decades, likely. And he has to be carried in because he's just become so large he can't even move any longer.
01:02:00
Speaker
And we get this section that is from his memoirs. And initially we see this from Valda's perspective and after almost doing a strange dance across the room and slapping Nina's dead body, Timoteo falls over having suffered what seems to be a stroke. But from Timoteo's perspective, it kind of
01:02:22
Speaker
moves back and forth in time. And one of the things that comes out is that Tim Mateo's room and Nina's room were next to each other. And looking out his window every morning, he saw this beautiful man put flowers on Nina's window. And this is Alberto. And this is him seeing Alberto for
01:02:47
Speaker
And because he's been in this room not doing anything, there's no reason for Alberto to come closer. This is him seeing him for the first time and it's love at first sight. And he knows her secret and he keeps it. And he knows that there is an affair and he knows that all this, but it's fine with him because he gets to see Alberto up until Alberto's death. And for this,
01:03:11
Speaker
maltreated, damaged person to have that sort of a moment of beauty and grace. I mean, the religious elements and the religious discussion taking place in this novel are really interesting. But this is a moment of grace for Timateo, for that to take place and for Cardoso to save it for our last interaction with Timateo is, I mean, it's profound. It's beautiful. And I
01:03:39
Speaker
Yeah, I really, really loved that moment. And there are larger things that are revealed that we will not go into. But I was already firmly convinced that this is one of the great novels I'm going to encounter. The tenderness with which that was handled confirmed for me. And also, just to say, the depiction of Timotheo could be
01:04:08
Speaker
perhaps Reda's a little bit worrisome. He's clearly queer. There are clearly other things happening with his family treating him like this, but then he becomes this physical monster.
01:04:22
Speaker
it can give you some pause, right, as you're reading it and gave me a little bit of pause. And I didn't think that was the case. But this very much just brought home how being in Menasies, what it had done to damage this person, but he still had the opportunity to feel something, feel something beyond that
01:04:45
Speaker
what we keep saying, which is such a great description, Laurie, that tomb that he was raised in and that he continued to live in. Yeah, I mean, he's a manifestation of the disfigurement of the kind of emotional, psychological disfigurement of the family, you know, what they've done to each other, what they've done to him, what their jealousy and
01:05:12
Speaker
Mean spiritedness has done to to Nina and to Andre I mean Yeah, I think that I think the fact that we we come to learn that underneath it all Timoteo is is a real human being is You're right a very redeeming quality of the book and I'm I'm really glad that you brought it up. Yeah and and I
01:05:39
Speaker
He sees Andre in that funeral moment and sees Andre and thinks of someone else. Timotheo gets, Timotheo had a very seemingly lonely life and maybe he was mad and that helped protect him from some of the elements of that, some of the harsher elements of that. But Timotheo also got to feel love and that I think is,
01:06:03
Speaker
I don't know. I think sometimes authors don't do right by their creations, by their characters. And I think Cardoso did a pretty solid job for Timoteo there. Yeah. There's some beauty in that human being, for sure. You always like to ask what other novels or works that we've encountered this one reminds us of. Any titles come to mind? Dear God.
01:06:34
Speaker
I mean, I think the leopard by Lampedusa, like in terms of portraying a noble family in decline, fighting back again. Interestingly, in the leopard, there's more of a fight back taking place against change. Here, this is just a capitulation. I think there's that. I think in terms of some of the
01:07:00
Speaker
That's the main one that comes to mind. I was going to maybe say, in terms of some of the religious conversation, but I don't think it's heavy enough for it to really work, maybe The Power and the Glory, but that's such a bleak novel. This one as dark as it is in many respects, I wouldn't call this a bleak novel. The Power and the Glory is supposed to be uplifting in a certain sense. God knows why or how.
01:07:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think I think the leopard is is the main one that that comes to mind for me. Maybe the House of Mist by Maria Luisa Bombal in terms of just sort of setting to a certain degree. I don't know that novel. Yeah, it's she was Chilean. I think it was Borges that referred to her as the mother of us all. Early, you know, modern writer.
01:07:53
Speaker
I mean, it has some of the feel of weathering heights, but with a 20th century Chilean, I think she's Chilean, Chilean perspective. It's quite good. But that's more kind of setting than it is anything else. I mean, this is just...
01:08:12
Speaker
I don't know. I think it's one of those unique ones. I mean, I think it has so much going on in here and its construction is so particular, like just the different voices and how they come in.
01:08:29
Speaker
I'd be very interested, and I know there really isn't anything else of his translated, but I'd be very interested to read any of his others and see if they're of a piece with this or if this is a true one-off. What about you? Anything to jump out at you? Well, I'll say with respect to your observation, I think it is weird that this is the only book of his that's been translated. He wrote a lot, according to Wikipedia.
01:08:58
Speaker
I'm so happy that Open Letter found this book for us, or maybe Margaret Joel Costa did. I don't know who initially said this deserves to be translated and published in English because it's a fantastic work.
01:09:21
Speaker
But thank you for that. And yeah, I really wish we would have some more of his stuff translated. You know, if you read that article that I wrote for Full Stop, I guess it's all there in terms of the comparisons that I would draw. For the Gothic and the kind of house and a family, kind of,
01:09:51
Speaker
a family line or just kind of a family name destroying itself, Absalom, Absalom by Faulkner comes to mind. And, you know, as I said, Benjamin Moser in his introduction brings up Faulkner.
01:10:09
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that the multi-vocality of it, you know, we have all these different voices kind of recounting the same or similar story, I think, is reminiscent of that. You know, Bund and Brooks by Thomas Mann, you know, just this house that's slowly decaying and in part it's a reflection of the decline of morals of the family.
01:10:37
Speaker
But it ain't nothing like this in terms of decline and morals. I mean, that book seems altogether proper compared to some of the stuff that happens in this one. And then the other comparison that I...
01:10:51
Speaker
I drew was to, um, wrestle in the coffin, crime and punishment, just because of, um, you know, there is this, I think between Anna, father, just, you know, um, there's a lot of talk about, about sin and, and, uh, kind of wanting to understand, you know, why
01:11:18
Speaker
why things happen in the world in a way that sometimes you try to seek redemption and you can't quite accomplish it. So yeah, I guess those are the three that I, but I would love it if listeners have some suggestions. I would love to get some ideas about some really great
01:11:44
Speaker
gothic novels like this, particularly gothic novels in translation. I feel like more contemporary novels right now kind of look at gothic elements in terms of body horror and some other things much more so than just this old kind of creepy dark house that's not
01:12:11
Speaker
That's not haunted in one sense, but is haunted just by its legacy and the memories of the people that are still living in it. Any suggestions on those lines would be absolutely fantastic.
01:12:25
Speaker
And as you're mentioning Faulkner, have you read Go Down Moses? I'm not, I'm not. Okay, that's one that I feel like a lot of people haven't done, and it's probably my favorite of his. And when I read your article and you mentioned the Faulkner bit, that's, I think it's more, in its construction, it reminds me a lot of what Cardoso was doing here as well. So definitely check out Go Down Moses 2, I think. Thanks for listening.
01:12:55
Speaker
Yeah, this is, I'm so happy that you made me read this huge thing that I've been afraid to read for so long. That's just been staring at me as I moved house a couple of times. So I'm thrilled. So thanks very much for the suggestion, Lori. This was an absolute banger. Yeah, it goes down easy. All right, take care, Lori. All right, thanks, Tom.
01:13:22
Speaker
you