kimberlywade

The Scale of Maps by Belen Gopegui is the story of a cartographer, a lover who thinks the only way to hold onto his perfect love is to end it and at the same time preserve the memory of it undiluted by the disillusioning influence of time.  Sergio Prim is a narrator so self conscious he sometimes writes of himself in the third person.  Here he describes his fear of intimacy:

“I am a retreating pair of hands, a body in retreat, alone in the bustle of bodies…I enter desire and maybe I find a place to rest, but right away a luminous fence lights up, a flashing orange blaze that compels me to cross, to run.”

Sergio addresses the reader and sometimes his young lover, Brezos, as he searches for the “interstices,” the gaps between time and space that he calls, “hollows”:

"Consider the precise dimensions of the word hollow.  Pay no attention to the container, no matter how empty it might be. Every container is a source of danger.”

He quotes DeBussy’s “Music is the silence between the notes.”

When Sergio finds a hollow, the moment unfolds like a landscape in his mind, an hallucinatory experience.  Where else have you ever read a sentence like this:  “As the first streetlamps were coming on, a sudden brightness shone in the window; you stretched out my body with your slender arms and every one of your sighs was like a step downward, a descent from the cross, a descent from the mirrors, laughter in a pit like an abyss that opened onto Australia, its great plains and sky of red suns.”

Gopegui knows her audience, addressing her readers as “my fellow introverts,” while striking at the nature of reality, the quiet, solitary spaces without thought.

I’ve said before that I’ve never read a Spanish to English translation without feeling like I was missing something.  I have to take that back; this book may be more beautiful in Spanish, but I don’t know how.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Scale-Maps-Belen-Gopegui/dp/087286510X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334162058&sr=8-1