Alvaro Enrigue, Sudden Death
Most of the way through this one I was afraid my initial impulse about it had been right: the tennis match between Quevedo and Caravaggio was too cute by half, and ruining a lot of other good material. There were some interesting threads on Cortés and what Spanish colonization meant on a human level to the civilizations that were destroyed; there were some other interesting threads on Italy and England, and on Caravaggio the eternal man of mystery. And in the middle of this, and threaded throughout, a history of tennis and a seemingly pointless fictional tennis match. I like playing tennis, and in my youth I watched a lot of tennis. Reading about tennis seems to be my breaking point.
And then it turned into something else, a different kind of narrative of decline, where Cortés snuffs out millions of lives and hundreds of years of knowledge and the Counter-Reformation snuffs out the Renaissance. Well, I've read a dozen accounts of the decline of and in modernity, and I've never seen that one before, nor put about so persuasively.
Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries
I have a long and never-to-be-published post building off of Phoebe's recently posts on whether and to what extent children can tell stories about their parents, having taken for a long time the position that parents should not be telling stories about their children to the world. I am ~1350 pages in to Anniversaries, with another 300 pages (!) and just under five weeks to go. Gesine's going to land in Prague on her business trip right as the Soviet tanks roll in. What happens then will presumably be beyond the scope of the Jahrbuch. We are firmly in the territory, narratively, of attempting to land the plane, and it seems clear that the plane will land one way or another. At a certain point, the impressive thing about a very long book is that it ends at all; if well, so much the better.
But I found myself last night thinking about its extreme length, and Phoebe's question about parents and children and their right to their own stories, and the extent to which this book is obviously and obviously not autobiographical. The length and form of the book pushes that last dichotomy to the very breaking point, since the structure of first-person narration and one entry per day removes a lot of the narrative place to hide. So I have this formulation I am now kicking around:
An autofictional-ish first-person narrative is both from personal experience and of necessity fictional.
a. From personal experience: you can't write a book of 1600 pages about nothing, there must be something in it worth expressing and passing on, especially tied as so much of it is to the author's own personal experience (Germany after the war, trying and failing to live in America)
b. Of necessity fictional: not merely in formal ways (the author is male and a small character in the book, the narrator is female; the narrator is happier in NYC) but in everything else because the sheer volume of research needed to convincingly describe the past in the eyes of other characters requires knowledge that has to be sought and cannot come natively. It just has to be made up.
...and if you want a way to separate, say, Soldiers of Salamis or for that matter War and Peace from contemporary first-person light autofiction, there's your difference--the research needed to make the other voices real, to provide a world beyond subjective impressions.