A Precarious, Provisional Order

Claire Foster reviews Daniel Saldaña París’s “Planes Flying over a Monster,” newly translated by Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman.

By Claire FosterSeptember 13, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

• Nonfiction

PLANES FLYING OVER a Monster, the new essay collection by Mexican poet and novelist Daniel Saldaña París, affords readers the freedom to perform an ambitious grafting of self onto page, place, and image. In each of these essays, eight of which were translated by Christina MacSweeney and two by Philip K. Zimmerman, Saldaña París moves through various cities, books, and beginnings—which, taken together, form a self-portrait in fragments, a reflection in literary and cartographic references. Saldaña París is careful not to confuse this reflection with a mirror. But maybe it’s a film: “Read this fragment at the speed and with the colors of a Super 8 movie,” he instructs in one of the essays. The looseness of Saldaña París’s authorial posture deliciously grants readers the space to stretch themselves—their bodies and their private libraries—as they read this stunning work of autobiography.

Some of my favorite writing in the book is from the “Preliminary Note,” where Saldaña París writes: “Many years ago, in a collection of essays by the poet Robert Creeley, I came across a question that has stuck in my mind. ‘Can you melt yourself autobiographically?’ This book is, in part, an attempt to respond to that question.” The 10 essays, or stammered answers, that follow were shaped and sounded out in several cities—Mexico City, Madrid, Montreal, Havana, New York, and Cuernavaca, Mexico—in multiple notebooks, in varying states of sobriety and maturity.

The first essay, “A Winter Underground,” is also the longest, comprising about a quarter of the book’s length. It has been translated by MacSweeney, who is also responsible for the translations of Saldaña París’s two other books that have appeared in English, a pair of fierce, beguiling novels published by Coffee House Press: Among Strange Victims (2016) and Ramifications (2020). “A Winter Underground” takes place in Montreal—later referred to as “that city that is too far north”—during a period of darkening winter and deepening addiction. The essay begins with an account of its opening gesture. Saldaña París has assigned himself a constraint: the governing rule for the essay, he tells us, is that he will work on it only in the afternoons. He usually writes in the mornings, he continues, because the words come more easily then (and even if the words aren’t good, the flow is pleasurable: “I like writing, like liking it”). This essay is an exception:

I intend to write [this text] in its entirety, after midday […] when facility is ebbing and I don’t feel in any way exceptional. What I hope is that weariness and ineptitude will give rise to a different truth […] I want to recount, without the distractions of rhetoric, the story of how I became involved […] in the opioid epidemic that has assailed North America.

Saldaña París explains how, after 10 years in Mexico City and multiple years of joint pain without relief—and doctor visits without a diagnosis—he found himself addicted to morphine in Montreal. (After years of untreated pain, he eventually learned that he had been suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease, since he was 29.) At the worst of his addiction, he was giving himself morphine enemas once a week. He was also splayed on the couch, thinking about writing his second novel; he was copying out paragraphs from The Brothers Karamazov into a notebook; and he was walking to the Grande Bibliothèque. He draws a poignant connection between public libraries and drug users, crediting the former as one of the latter’s few remaining safety nets—in the winter, as protection from the cold temperatures, and in some cases, as protection from overdose: “In the Vancouver Public Library, the librarians are trained to administer an antidote—naloxone spray—in the case that a user overdoses. First-aid training has become an indispensable element on the librarians’ résumés.”

Eventually, Saldaña París “decided to stop” taking morphine, though he is not completely sure how long he was in its throes. “It turns out that I’m very bad at marking time in my own life,” he writes, in a winking admission that is typical of the author. Saldaña París is intent on reminding readers that accuracy is not his intention—or, rather, accuracy is not a worthwhile barometer with which to judge the telling of one’s own life. Directly after describing his reading of The Brothers Karamazov, he admits that he remembers nothing of it. Later, in an essay describing an orgy that involved animal entrails—in which we come to understand why a piñata is depicted on the cover of the book—he writes: “I once wrote a thinly disguised short story based on this same anecdote. But, strangely enough, fiction took the edge off the narrative. What in fact happened was much worse and much less credible.”

Saldaña París attended 12-step Narcotics Anonymous meetings for several months, and he takes us on a grand tour of one of those weeks: he attends meetings in English, meetings in French, bilingual meetings; some are led exclusively by women and LGBTQ+ people; some are filled with students and professors, some with housewives, teenage punks, elderly Hells Angels, Italian mafiosi, Latin Americans, and a bank robber. But Saldaña París is “less interested in talking about drugs than about the city.” Throughout this book, Saldaña París never loses track of maps, zones, and the weather, or how reading, addiction, literature, memory, and body pain may dictate how we move through a place or how a place moves through us:

[T]he act of repeating a gesture or a set of random words, putting one’s mind and body into that repetition, is sometimes enough in itself to reassemble the shards of the spirit and reestablish the most beautiful fiction we are capable of inventing: the fiction that, in spite of all, some order does exist. A perhaps precarious, provisional order. A map that is in constant transformation even as we live within the territory it outlines, and which remains stamped in our memory when we—finally—move to another place.

This pressing of one’s private fiction onto a city’s public space reminded me of Renee Gladman’s To After That (TOAF), originally published in 2008 and soon to be rereleased by Dorothy. Like Saldaña París’s book, Gladman’s is devoted to the description of an abandoned work and the changing of a city, and the narrator’s intimacies and rented apartments, over a misremembered period of time. “The way one carries one’s productivity around in urban space is joyous,” Gladman writes. “[E]verything you experience from that moment […] feels good. That joy lasts as long as your walk through the city, and dissolves when you return home to your work.”

As noted, Saldaña París’s book invites this critical melting of one’s personal reading onto his writing. Indeed, he invites us to use our own libraries as a scrim through which to view a landscape. It’s what the author has been doing across several continents, in several languages and living rooms, for decades, and now, as I read this book in a city, and a country, in which I was not born, in a newly rented apartment into which I’ve just moved several hundred stacks of books, I will do the same.

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In every city, Saldaña París is reading. In Montreal, it’s Réjean Ducharme; in Havana, Witold Gombrowicz and Julián Herbert; in Mexico City, among young poets, Efraín Huerta; and, on a falconry kick, Helen Macdonald and J. A. Baker. In Madrid, as a student pursuing a theory of dissipation, it’s Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski; in Cuernavaca, it’s Michel Leiris and Jack London and Malcolm Lowry. In New York, looking back on a period of his childhood that was spent in a cult, as an adolescent “assistant of the sun” for the Art of Living movement, it’s Charles Baudelaire in Paris Spleen (1869).

In “The Secret History of My Library,” Saldaña París declares that “the history of [his] library is the history of loss,” lamenting all the books that have vanished between moves, across continents and decades, and in at least one earthquake. During my reading of Planes, however, another loss becomes apparent to me, and it’s the overwhelming paucity of women writers in its pages, considering the vast number of names and works cited throughout. The “Selected Reading” list at the end of the book—a tiny fraction of the literary references in Planes—includes 44 titles, three authored by women.

But I am also impelled, here, to cite another literary sufferer of autoimmune disease who has become a lodestar of my own library, Caren Beilin. Beilin’s Blackfishing the IUD (2019)—a nonfiction account of her rheumatoid arthritis, which was triggered by the insertion of a copper IUD—begins with the unpacking of her library. She’s organizing it by gender, and she’s a bit embarrassed about making a point of gender at all: “In my apartment I knew […] that this wasn’t the right moment to revel in any binaries. It would be quaint, and wrong, to discipline books by a painful and fabricated construction.” And it would be equally quaint, and wrong, of me to include this relatively minor point without making equal note that one of the most moving passages in Saldaña París’s library essay credits the influence of his mother and grandmother—in particular, via a passed-down set of the complete writings of Freud in Spanish translation: “In the various layers of that palimpsest of the women readers who preceded me, in that female lineage of marginal note-takers—glosses and comments on the founder of psychoanalysis—lies, I choose to believe, the origin of my vocation as a storyteller.”

The second essay in Planes, “Return to Havana,” begins with several second beginnings—a paradox that clearly pleases Saldaña París—in countless notebooks: “This is the second time I’ve begun this piece. I’m writing it in a green notebook.” And again: “This is the second time I’ve begun to write this piece. If I refer back to the earlier pages of this same notebook, I can read the first version of these lines, which isn’t so very different from this one.” Later still: “It probably isn’t either the second or the third time I’ve begun to write this. I’ve most likely written many other versions of these hurried paragraphs littered with commas and doubts in green notebooks that I’ve now lost.”

If this were to be an ending to my review, or at least one version of an ending, I might attempt to assess whether, and to what degree, and with which tools, Saldaña París has melted himself autobiographically. And I would not be able to say for sure. But I would be able to tell you that Planes is a wise, generous book that contains all the miracles of a little walk taken in the afternoon to wake oneself up. If Saldaña París’s readers were to zoom out from the map that is this book, if we were to peer upon it from above, I think we would see its author walking, creating with his steps the shape of a question mark. Then we might see him turn back again, walking always further, following the syntax of a city street to retrace his story, and to remember, or remake, the question.