So Much Smoke I Halford I Sydney Review of Books



December 2, 2016




Félix Calvino’s Lost Galicia

James Halford is a recipient of a 2016 SRB-CA Emerging Critics Fellowship. This is the second of three essays by Halford that will appear on the Sydney Review of Books, alongside essays by other fellowship recipients, Ben Brooker and Ali Jane Smith. 


‘Galicia is a garden where one always breathes pure aromas, freshness, and poetry,’ wrote the romantic novelist and poet Rosalía de Castro in 1863. ‘Lakes, waterfalls, streams … serene blue skies like those of Italy … Need I say more? No pen could enumerate its charms.’ De Castro and other nineteenth-century nationalists of Galicia’s literary Rexurdimiento were moved to proclaim their love of the region at the height of the greatest exodus in its history. Between 1860 and 1910 something like half a million Galicians left for the Americas. This was the largest in a series of mass migrations from the region, which was among the poorest in Spain from the eighteenth century right through to the 1970s. For centuries Galicians had to periodically abandon their farms due to overcrowding, unemployment, and crises in agricultural production. During the nineteenth century they arrived in Latin America in such numbers that ‘gallego’ jokes, based on peasant stereotypes, became a genre of their own. In 1955, the Galician intellectual Ramón Otero Pedrayo, a less romantic nationalist than De Castro, described his home, not as a garden, but as a ‘land of goodbyes.’

Out of this history of material struggle and displacement, Galicia’s writers have fashioned a rich literature. In recent times, a new crop of Galician-language authors – Manuel Rivas, Xose Luis Mendez, and María do Carme Kruckenberg among the most prominent – have carried on the Rexurdimiento tradition at home, even as diasporic writers have created a new branch of Galician writing abroad. All of them have had to negotiate a relationship with the controversial legacy of Galicia’s best-known twentieth-century writer, the Franco loyalist and 1989 Nobel Laureate for literature, Camilo José Cela.

Franco’s dictatorship drove mass migration, not just from Galicia but from all corners of Spain, for decades. The post-war Spanish diaspora spread to Australia, where expatriate communities developed in both Sydney and Melbourne. Australian Immigration Department records show that about 26,000 Spaniards arrived in Australia between 1945 and 1975. Many of them came under Australian government-assisted migration schemes such as Operación Canguro (1958-1963). This was less a humanitarian gesture on the part of the Australian government, and more an acknowledgement that the preferred British migrants were unlikely to work for paltry wages in the Queensland cane fields or the Riverina tobacco plantations. The early Spanish migrants often languished in squalid camps, like the infamous Bonegilla, for extended periods.
_____

The Galician-Australian writer, Felix Calvino, arrived with a slightly later wave of Spanish migrants. Calvino grew up in a small village about an hour’s drive from the Galician capital, Santiago de Compostela, and fled Spain in 1964 on his twentieth birthday to avoid military service. After a few years learning English in the UK, he emigrated to Sydney and established himself as a restaurateur, wine merchant, and travel agent. He was a prominent member of the Spanish expatriate community, married and had a family. In the nineties, he made a new start in Melbourne, and finally fulfilled a lifelong goal of undertaking tertiary study. His talents as a fiction writer were not discovered until he was well into his fifties. At the encouragement of the Greek-Australian writer George Papaellinas, one of his teachers at the University of Melbourne, Calvino began publishing short stories in Australian and US literary magazines.
  
His first short-story collection, A Hatful of Cherries (2007), is notable for its juxtaposition of Galician and Australian settings. About half the stories unfold in the underdeveloped, autocratic post-war Galicia of Calvino’s youth, the rest deal with working-class Spanish migrants in 1960s and 1970s Australia. The ghosts of the Spanish Civil War have haunted his writing from the start. In ‘Don’t Touch Anything,’ the child narrator is sent away from the burial of a school mate’s grandfather when the adults stumble upon a mass grave. ‘After that,’ he remarks, ‘dreams of earth and bones often visited me in my sleep.’ Another early story, ‘Two Men at the Border,’ fictionalises the ordeal of escaping Franco’s Spain.

Calvino’s second book, the novella Alfonso (2013), tells the story of a Galician man struggling to invent himself in 1960s Sydney. Alfonso is desperate for the love of an Australian woman, but remains a virgin into his thirties, unable to establish or maintain an adult relationship. Why this sensitive, hard-working, and resilient young man cannot give or receive love is the book’s central mystery. Nothing that we know of him – the loss of his father in the Civil War, his lapsed Catholicism, or his macho Spanish friends’ warnings – fully explains his decade-long terror of Australian women, his decision to sever contact with his elderly mother in Galicia, or the depths of psychological torment to which he subjects himself in his dilapidated Surry Hills terrace house. Calvino’s unsettling imagery and language disrupt what at first appears to be a simple, realist Bildungsroman. The novel gestures at a culturally particular form of homesickness that can never be fully expressed in English. Morriña, the specifically Galician ache for home, has been a favourite subject of its writers since De Castro’s time.
_____

Eight of the eleven stories in Calvino’s new collection, So Much Smoke, return to the nameless Galician village that appeared in his first collection. The very short story or microcuento is a Calvino speciality. At only 600-words, the opener, ‘They Are Only Dreams,’ stands out for its unity and concision. As mother and daughter watch milk boil on the stone hearth of a farm kitchen in winter, the girl confesses she has dreamed of an old man dying. Bells are heard tolling in the village across the river and a neighbour brings news that the shoemaker has died in the night. Spooked, the mother shares this latest proof of the girl’s prophetic gifts with her husband. The man listens as he oils a fox trap in the barn, but refuses to believe.

A sequence of concrete images and sense impressions – the milk, the fire, the dead man’s white beard, the bells, the snow-covered hills, the trap – fulfil a function akin to the effet de réel of the classic realist short story (we might be reading Chekhov or Maupassant). Yet the absence of an authoritative narrator gives equal weight to the man’s positivist viewpoint and the woman’s mystical, religious one. In the tiny clockwork universe of the microcuento, the fox trap never springs closed, so that both readings of the story remain available, and the unresolved tension lingers.

It is no literary effect that Calvino’s stories set in rural Galicia in the 1950s and 1960s sometimes feel like they could be unfolding in the nineteenth century or even the middle ages. After the Nationalist victory, Franco deliberately set back the clock in the Spanish countryside, aiming, as George Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia, ‘not so much to impose Fascism as to restore feudalism.’ But Calvino also bears witness to the exhaustion of the old rural order and the arrival of modernity. In ‘The Road,’ a peasant dies without leaving a will, and his two sons must negotiate the division of the family land. Benito tricks his simpleton younger brother José into accepting the swampy, unproductive plot by the coast. But a landslide in a storm results in a sudden reversal of fortunes: ‘the receding waters exposed a stone road, emerging from the sea like a recalled ghost.’ Heritage tourism, not agriculture, it turns out, represents Galicia’s economic future.

The new collection’s novella-length centrepiece, ‘The Smile,’ unfolds closer to home. It is set in the Sydney Spanish community during the final years of the Franco dictatorship, a world of English classes and shift-work, football on the radio, and paella on the stove. The young Galician protagonist, José, befriends an older Spanish couple, Fidel and Consuelo – a street sweeper and a cleaner – whose Sunday lunches in the Andalusian-style garden of their home are a refuge for exiled Spaniards. Calvino’s attention to the rituals of food and drink highlights the way meals bind friendship networks together in the new country. ‘It’s like my mother’s cooking, which I miss,’ remarks one character.

In the Australian stories the elements of parable, fairy tale, and magic realism are less pronounced but not absent. Both Fidel and Consuelo have disfigured faces that frighten children and attract stares from adults. As Consuelo is dying in hospital of an inoperable brain tumour, José experiences a ghostly visitation outside his kitchen window. And, after her death, he continually senses her presence in the mirrors of Fidel’s home. José’s first encounter with loss and grief changes his cynical, skirt-chasing ways. As the younger man helps Fidel through the ‘exquisite pain,’ of his wife’s loss, and learns more about his friends’ marriage, their relationship comes to represent, in his mind, an ideal of self-acceptance and unconditional love he would one day like to experience. Meanwhile, the bachelor must teach his older friend the life skills he needs to survive alone: ‘Fidel learned to boil a potato, fry an egg, grill a steak and hang out the laundry.’ Like Alfonso, Fidel retreats from the material hardship and loneliness of migrant life into memories of his Spanish past. For him, as for thousands of other scattered Spaniards, Franco’s death in 1975, opens the possibility of return.

Calvino’s fiction, too, seems to be moving back to the village. The stories in So Much Smoke rely upon the defamiliarisation effect used in his earlier books: Galicia is made strange through the English language; Australia is made strange by non-native English and a Galician worldview. In this collection, however, the teeming social world of the village takes over, threatening to spill beyond the boundaries of the short form.

This collection firmly establishes Calvino as an English prose stylist. The influence of Anglophone modernist minimalism is apparent and appropriate. Through absence and implication, the stories register feelings of loss the characters themselves often lack the language to articulate. If, as Rosalía de Castro wrote, to sing of Galicia in the Galician language offers ‘consolation against evil, relief from pain,’ to write of it in English implies something else entirely.

References
Australian Government Department of Immigration and Border Protection. ‘Historical Migration Statistics.’  2016. Web. Oct 17 2016.
Calvino, Félix. Alfonso. Melbourne: Arcadia, 2013.
– A Hatful of Cherries. Melbourne: Arcadia, 2007.
– So Much Smoke. Melbourne: Arcadia, 2016.
De Castros, Rosalia. Cantares Gallegos. 1863. Buenos Aires: Tor, 1947.
Fernandez-Shaw, Carlos M. Espana Y Australia: Quinientos Anos De Relaciones.Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores de Espana, 2000.
Giraldez, Jose Miguel. ‘Félix Calviño: La Memoria De Galicia Siempre Será Mi Refugio.’ El Correo Gallego 2011. Acessed 14 September 2016.
Leggott, Sarah. Memory, War, and Dictatorship in Recent Spanish Fiction by Women. Vol. 21. London: Routledge, 2015.
Preston, Paul. A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War. London: Harper Collins, 1996.
Rodriguez Galdo, Maria Xose, and Abel Losada Alvarez. ‘A Contribution to the Study of Historical Relations between Galicia and Australia. Migration and the Labour Market.’ Australia and Galicia: Defeating the Tyranny of Distance. Eds. Maria Jesus Lorenzo Modia, and Roy C. Boland Osegueda. 2008. 101-30.

The SRB-CA Emerging Critics Fellowships are supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. 
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The Sydney Review of Books is an initiative of the Writing and Society Research Centre.





Alfonso I Jennifer Popa I Antipodes

November 30, 2016



  In the quiet company of a dreamer

Jennifer Popa
Austin, Texas.

Often the novice writer is told that her characters need to have desires, wants, obsessions. While it seems a rather obvious statement, the question “What does this character want?” can summon a cringe from the writer. Matters such as plot, dialogue, or structure—these are manageable craft points, in that they are sometimes easier to pin down, but succinctly describing the innermost desires of a human proves a bit unwieldy. There is something inherently personal and loaded in the question, especially when asked of the writer herself, who is both attempting to depict it and also the inventor of said desire. Even in our own lives, it is difficult to say precisely what we want, at least not plainly or without qualifiers, and if we can identify it, we are not always right. Yet Félix Calvino navigates this question with ease in his slender novel Alfonso, as his title character’s desires are palpable; each page is saturated with his wish for connection. This is possibly because the character’s life parallels the author’s own. Alfonso’s sense of longing is a want so unmistakable, so tangible on the page, that the reader inevitably inherits its burden.

The book opens on Alfonso walking home from his construction job, as he experiences the quiet yearning upon seeing the doppelgänger of a girl from his village. He remembers the village girl at their first communion “dressed in white and looking more angel than girl” (3). He decides he must meet the replica girl and devises plans to encounter her again at the bus stop.

Alfonso’s world is one of duality. There is a double consciousness as he oscillates between replication and reinvention, between his Spanishness and his Australianness. There is a split in his person at the moment he leaves Spain, when his two discernible selves take shape: the one from before and the other who looks toward a bright though elusive future. Still, he remains hopeful that his turn will come. Although he has escaped poverty—an achievement that serves as the springboard for all his good fortune—in Australia he has stayed within the safety of his Spanish bubble. If he wanted, he could lead a life with minimal assimilation among a community of immigrants, but mostly Alfonso’s world is one of loneliness. In his kitchen, he dances with a spatula and a glass of wine, pretending that he is instead dancing with a beautiful woman. He befriends a neighborhood tomcat, which he names Guapo, but even the cat remains aloof: “He also concluded reluctantly that in Guapo’s heart, there was limited space for him” (43). As he restores his row house, he talks to the disembodied voice of a woman, who is part ghostly companion, part invention, part hallucination. The woman’s voice is complimentary, though they sometimes quarrel about his design choices. There is an inevitable claustrophobia to his routine:

The four walls he had washed and painted twice as a gesture of friendship would have captured, as a mirror would, his frustration at trying to sew on a button, or trying not to scorch a new shirt; his clumsy attempts at cooking dinner with half of the ingredients missing until he trained himself to write a shopping list before going shopping; his relentless learning and relearning of English words; his chores of washing, cleaning, daily bed-making, and weekly changing of the bed sheets. These same walls would have recorded his loneliness in daytime and sadness always at night. The narrow wardrobe, the Triumph stove, the couch, two wooden chairs, and the aluminum table with the green Formica top would have watched his character crossing from youth to man, although he could not identify the exact turning point. Perhaps the pieces came together like a jigsaw. (33)

For the reader, the tangible objects in Alfonso’s home take center stage: the carrots and potatoes he is cooking for dinner, the cabinets he restores, and the telephone that does not ring. They only fade to the background when Alfonso retreats to memory to reimagine the details of an encounter with a woman. The care he takes in constructing a life that would welcome a companion and these visions of companionship are so earnest. Yet even when his dream woman arrives in the form of the beautiful Australian Nancy, he is not entirely sure what to do. Sometimes his naiveté trumps his desires, just as his loneliness can be at times willful.

Alfonso’s immigrant experience is deceptively simple. Very little happens in the span of these 117 pages, but there is an economy in Calvino’s narrative that allows us to fully engage with Alfonso. The rhythm of his solitary routine renders an agreeable hum on the page, in part because Alfonso is quite likable as characters go. This is not to say that he is not fallible but that he is human, and there is a universal familiarity in his anxieties and dreams. One cannot help but admire his deliberate efforts: when he is rebuffed by the replica girl, he sets out to learn English through course work, becoming a member of the library and reading his Reader’s Digest subscription. After years as a “bed-sitter,” he buys a dilapidated house and restores it faithfully every day for three years; there is a tenderness in his dismissing his male friends who vilify women. Quite simply, I enjoy his company, and there is a comfort in occupying his headspace. While the immigrant experience might be foreign for the reader, Alfonso teaches us something about the ways in which we live, in particular about the moments when we might feel like strangers to our own lives.

Félix Calvino, Alfonso
Author(s): Jennifer Popa
Source: Antipodes, Vol. 30, No. 1 (June 2016), pp. 231-233
Published by: Wayne State University Press



 Félix Calvino. Alfonso. Melbourne:
Arcadia, 2013. 117 pp. A$22.95. ISBN: 
978-1-925003-20-8





Alfonso I Review I Cass Moriarty

November 28, 2016



Sometimes a novella is the perfect length - long enough to engage with the characters and to get your teeth into the story; short enough to carry around with you, and to still get that satisfactory feeling of finishing a book! And when the novella is a colourful tale, simply told, full of smells and sounds and visions and ideas and memories and dreams and hopes ... well, so much the better. Felix Calvino's novella Alfonso is all of these things. Alfonso is a Spanish migrant who hopes to master the English language, to prosper, and to meet a good woman, in his new homeland of Australia (not necessarily in that order). This is the story of his journey. It begins with clear and distinct memories of what and who he has left behind - his family, his church, his village, his dead father (killed in the war). It progresses to his first experiences in a land far removed from his place of birth in terms of, well, almost everything - climate and weather, landscape, language, culture, customs and people. It depicts in vivid detail his first struggling attempts to gain a foothold in his new country - simple steps such as purchasing furniture and household implements, to eventually buying a small house and completely renovating it, room by room. And always, hovering in the background of all his successes and failures over the years, is his want and need for a woman to share his life, and his bed. 
This is a book that is easy to read; a straightforward story of home and travels, of arrivals and departures, of making a nest of one's own. It is an interesting and sensitive portrait of the migrant experience of the sixties and seventies, and of just how much it costs - financially, socially, and emotionally - to leave behind all you know in order to follow your hopes for something better. I am looking forward to the launch of Felix's new collection of short stories, So Much Smoke, at Avid Reader on Friday, 16 December.

So Much Smoke I Avid Reader

November 25, 20016

                         

                          

Felix Calvino - So Much Smoke

Friday 16 December 2016
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
In store at Avid Reader Bookshop
Register until 16 December 2016 6:00 PM
This event commences at 6.30pm. Printed tickets are not issued for this event. There is a door list with your booking under your surname.
Join Patrick Holland as he launches So Much Smoke, a collection of short stories by Felix Calvino.
The short stories in So Much Smoke owe much to Félix Calvino’s own experiences as a migrant who moved from the Galicia region of Spain to Australia, a country and culture radically different from the peasant village he left behind. The majority of the stories chronicle the hardships and small joys of village life, while the Australian stories tell of the migrant experience in which all that is known is forfeited in the search for material security. 
Félix Calvino is a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland. He is the author of the short story collection, A Hatful of Cherries (2007), and the novella Alfonso (2013) released by Australian Scholarly Publishing.

A Hatful of Cherries

November 25, 2016

Review


What a delight to discover Felix Calvino's short story collection, A Hatful of Cherries. Originally from Galacia in the northwest of Spain, Felix grew up on a farm but fled his homeland to avoid military service under General Franco. His eclectic mix of stories are inspired either by his memories of his childhood in that country, and the political, economic and cultural difficulties of the time, or by his experience as an immigrant to Australia in the sixties, and his subsequent life in this country.

Felix writes in a style that is spare, sparse and simple. He depicts everyday actions and situations with an experienced eye for detail and nuance. His descriptions of characters and of the weather and the landscape are concise and meticulous. The tension in each of his stories is taut; he engages the reader on a tightly held line, and reels us in slowly but deliberately to the resolution. 

Each story is self-contained and complete, but all are open-ended - there remains a question, a possibility of further thought, at the conclusion of each. 

I love the terrible inevitability of Basilio, the misunderstanding of Detour, the sharp childhood memories of The Pocketknife, the humour of An Old Sheep, the poignancy of A Hatful of Cherries, the playful familiarity and mirth of The Laundry Incident, the hopefulness of The Bride, the gritty depiction of addiction in Restless Hands, the imagination of Ghosts on the Beach, and the melancholy of Silvia, and of Unfinished Thoughts. This is a highly readable and appealing compilation that is moving, empathetic and engaging. Thank-you Melissa Ashley for introducing us.

The Road

July 27, 2016                          


My short story, The Road, appears in Social Alternatives
Volume No.35 [1]

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Correo Gallego

July 15, 2016


Readings I May 27 I Santiago de Compostela






Mallorca



May 6, 2016


 THE 2nd AUSTRALIAN SEMINAR SERIES AT THE UIB   
















The juxtaposition of Spanish and Australian cultures in the writings of Félix Calviño

Félix Calviño was born in Galicia and grew up on a farm. To avoid military service under General Franco, he went to England. A few years later he migrated to Australia. 
The short stories contained in his forthcoming book So Much Smoke’ owe much to their creator’s own experiences as a migrant from the Galicia region of Spain who has chosen to move to Australia, a country and a culture that is radically different from that of the peasant village he left behind. The majority of the stories chronicle the hardships and small joys of village life, while the Australian stories investigate the migrant experience in which all that is known is forfeited in the search for material security.      

May 17 at 16.00   

AULA DE GRAUS - RAMON LLULL BLG.   

Presented by Dr Eduard Moyà and recommended to those interested in Migrant Literatures, Australian Studies, Cultural Studies, Creative Writing and Literatures in English.   

Cultural Diversity in the Australian Short Story


April 7, 2016



Cultural Diversity in the Australian Short Story is a collection of Australian short stories for translation and publication in China. The collection will be used by students in Chinese universities and will be distributed through the network of Australian Studies Centres in China.

‘The editors of the collection are Michael Griffiths, Huang Zhong and Wenche Ommundsen. The translators are members of the English department of Wuhan University. This project comes out of a long-standing collaboration between the University of Wollongong  and Wuhan University, supported by both universities and the Australia China Council.’

My story ‘The Bride’ A Hatful of Cherries (2007) is included in this anthology.  

The publishing of a new work is always an important occasion for me. In this case there is the  added feeling of representing Australia (albeit in a minuscule way), the country I now call home.