Compendium--The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

General Ideas/Questions

Early on, wondering why we need the filter of this first-person narrator.

For a while, I wondered whether Mayta was an actual person or not, and then I spent a while wondering whether it mattered. I'm still not sure I've come to a conclusion.

Page 66: "This is make-believe, a novel,' says Juanita, with a smile that forgives me for my transgression. 'This isn't at all like the real story, in any case.'" I'm not sure how seriously to take this comment in the context of the story, and indeed this idea was one I'd already been considering, that the project of our character's book was the book that we were reading.

Page 166: "…that's the Mayta of those days, the one I perceive best among all the other Maytas." This is the line where I finally put together at least some variation of a logical reason for all the different tenses and POVs--they're all meant to be different fragmentary representations of the person the author is attempting to recreate.

Passages

Page 14: "That's what you see in the photo: a tired man. Tired from not having slept enough, from having walked a lot, or, maybe, tired from something that's much older, the fatigue of a life thathas reached a boundary, not old age yet, but something that might well be old age if behind it there is, as in Mayta's case, nothing but lost illusions, frustrations, mistakes, enemies, political deceptions, want, bad food, jail, police stations, an underground life, failures of all kinds and nothing even remotely resembling a victory. And nevertheless, in that exhausted and tense countenance, there glows as well, somehow, that secret, intact integrity in the face of setbacks which it always thrilled me to find in him over the years, that juvenile purity, capable of reacting with the same indignation to any injustice, in Peru or at the ends of the earth, and that honest belief that the most urgent task, the one that could not be shirked, was to change the world." So much of the story to this point has moved quickly, but here we pause for nearly an entire page just to look at a picture, to fully explore a character in a single moment -- everything else has discovered character in summary, but here close detail gives us a different yet equally fragmented glance into this person who we only know via memory.

Page 44: "I don't know how to go on. If I could, I would tell him, but at this moment I only know that I want to know, even invent, Mayta's story, and as lifelike as possible. I could give him moral, social, and ideological reasons, and show him that Mayta's story is the most important, the one that most urgently needs to be told. But it would all be a lie. I truthfully do not know why Mayta's story intrigues and disturbs me." Normally I hate moves like this, which seem forced almost entirely to build a nonexistent tension. Here, however, it works well because I believe it. I believe that the narrator really doesn't have an answer, and I'm just as invested as he is in following his journey. I feel him truly flummoxed and attempting to work through it.

Page 110: "I know he's wrong, that it can still get worse, that there are no limits to our deterioration, but I respect his grief and keep my mouth shut." In many ways, this line alone feels like a key to all the thematic elements of the book (putting aside the trickery of differing POVs and all of that). There is a dread that follows everyone in this story, a dread of things falling apart, of the revolution failing and destroying what society there was out of good intentions, of a constant downward spiral. Also, this idea of an overbearing silence/fear -- Mayta has his secret, no one wants to open the hornet's nest that our narrator keep asking questions about, the narrator is terrified of being on the streets at all times of day.

Page 232: He had an ambiguous feeling, exaltation and anxiety, because even though the police were locked up, and their weapons captured, and the telephone and telegraph knocked out, wasn't their little group extremely vulnerable? Could you begin a revolution just like that? He gritted his teeth. You could. You had to be able to." I love the idea of this ambiguous feeling. Plus, the oscillation of this vulnerability even as it seems like they have all their bases covered, and yet the ridiculousness of thinking that anything in this small moment could begin a revolution -- especially the hilarious boy scout walk as this small group of 10 people marches down the streets proclaiming revolution.

Techniques

We start with the personal, with our main character taking a morning run, which then expands into a full view of the neighborhood/world, where we're quickly immersed into the way that this universe works, and that understand is then quickly used to funnel us back into the personal, but a different person (Mayta) by describing his responses to the world. All of this allows us as readers to nearly immediately understand everything we need to get in order to know the way the book will function -- POV, place, main characters and their relationship to the narrator, in a page and a half.

Writing two completely disparate moments in the same paragraph/moment with no transition: a scene of backstory at the same time as a scene in present time -- sometimes (page eight, the dialogue particularly) without even telling us that we're switching timelines other than through clues in the action itself.

Lots and lots of lengthy lists.

By chapter three, we're incorporating three moments into the same scene seamlessly -- Mayta is conversing with Vallejos, with Vallejos' sister the nun, and our narrator is conversing with the two nuns from different convents, all jumping back and forth without transitions.

Page 95: "'You know that Mayta was a homosexual, of course.'" We've seen this for a while in the text, which I'm slowly coming to the decision that the past-tense of this story is an actual novel being worked on while we're seeing the accumulation and gathering of knowledge in the present tense. So, here we're learning something in the time of the narrator that has already been established in the past -- or, we're seeming to learn it before the narrator, in a way.

Page 112: "Did Mayta…He would have…he began to feel the altitude…" Here we're jumping from supposition about him into the actual story of Mayta (whether that's his actual story or the novel being written or something else I haven't considered), an easy transition that almost feels unnecessary since we've switched so many times before.

Page 115: "You were in Jauja, Mayta, but you didn't feel well." The transitory techniques are changing. Mayta is being addressed rather than narrated now, and a few pages earlier his story bled into its own moment in the middle of paragraphs. Something about the text is changing here -- it almost feels like the balance of power between narrator and character is shifting.

Page 120: "It was true. He had never felt anything like that pressure in his temples and that giddiness in his heart…" And now, the text is clearly interacting with itself. The present-day story's dialogue is now creating responses in the past-day characters. The narration of the third person is taking our present-day first-person POV as a launching pad for the actions that have already happened.

Page 152: "'Actually, there are only seven of us,' I correct him." Mayta has taken over the I perspective, suddenly, as well as the present tense. Is the story taking over the novel, have the two characters simply switched roles? On the next page, we jump into a backstory that's Mayta and past tense -- suddenly, the book has fallen back in time to the actual story our narrator was writing, it seems, with Mayta as the protagonist and his history being relayed in memory.

Page 204: "But Juan Zarate has. Every so often, he would come to Lima from Pucallpa or Yurimaguas, where he was working in lumber camps, and they would have lunch. But ever since this stuff began--the attacks, the kidnappings, the bombings, the war--he hasn't written or come: he's either dead or he is one of them." While it's likely that this Adelaide talking, it certainly seems possible to be a moment where, possibly for the first time, we're jumping into an omniscient third-person POV that's following someone other than Mayta or a person in direct contact with Mayta. This is complicated, and pointed out, explicitly on the next page, where "Mayta's son is not asleep. In the small headquarters dugout, he argues, trying to impose his point of view." That's a hilarious nod to the reader, in my opinion, while also fitting perfectly in story. I want to be able to do that some day.

Page 230: "It seemed incredible that everything was going so well, Mayta." Is this Mayta thinking of himself in third person, or the narrator speaking to the character he's created, or something else?

Chapter eight, instead of one or two large players, we're now introduced to bit players who each had momentary parts in the attempted revolution. An interesting technique when so much of the novel has explored, slowly, the lengthy machinations of a small moment in time, to here go quickly through these moments.

Page 249: "He really should say, "We left."" Interesting that for all the second-nature telling of the stories, all the people lying about their part in each moment, the story that we're told, from Mayta's point of view, never changes. That is always consistent, never seeming to go back to rewrite or redefine.

Stories/lines/ideas to steal/attempt

Been a while since I've said this, but I just flat want to steal the premise of the book -- or at least the premise as I see it here, about five pages in. I love this idea of a tell-all book about a famous political activist (I keep imagining it as a Chairman Mao-type, rather than the revolutionary Mayta's described as) from the perspective of a close friend. It loses something in describing it, and I've deflated about halfway on the idea just in writing those last few sentences, but I was immediately wanting to try writing it when I started reading.

Page 22: "…the most consistent aspect of his career was always to have taken, with a kind of infallible intuition, all the necessary steps so that things would turn out for the worst, so that he would be entangled in problems and complications. 'What he is is an amateur suicide…'"

Page 51: "Most people are honest because they have no choice…"

Page 123: "My job is to listen, observe, compare stories, mix it all together and weave a fantasy."

Page 145: "And I shall think, remember, and imagine until, just before dawn, I give form to this episode in the real life of Alejandro Mayta."

Page 157: "A hunchback is looking at her legs."