This match was judged by Chad W. Post. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read
this, and download the updated bracket.

First off, let it be said that Barley Patch doesn糖心传媒檛 even deserve to be playing in this match.

Sure, Mauro had his reasons for choosing Gerald Murnane糖心传媒檚 self-conscious masterpiece over Javier Marias糖心传媒檚 Your Face Tomorrow, but no matter what YouPoint PowerTube images he tosses out, I would rather read 12,000 pages of this:

‘What Dearlove could not bear,’ obviously I didn’t call him Dearlove, but by his real name, ‘is that his life should end like that; in short, he would find the manner of his death almost unbearable than death itself. He would, of course, be terrified to see his successful existence truncated and to lose his life, as would anyone, even if that life had been a failure; what’s more, I don’t, as I said, believe him to be a brave man, he would be terribly afraid. What most horrifies Dearlove, though, as it does other show-business people (although they may not know it), is that the end of his story should be such that it overshadows and darkens the life he’s lived and accumulated up until now, eclipsing it, almost erasing and cancelling out the rest and, in the end, becoming the only fact that counts and will be recounted.

(You know, like how died of auto-erotic asphyxiation, which is all we really remember him for. Sorry, INXS fan.)

Than even 25 pages of this:

While I was writing the first few sentences of the previous paragraph, I was unable to recall any details of the images of persons and faces that I had had in mind while I read as a child the series of short stories referred to. At some time while I was writing the last two sentences of the previous paragraph, I found myself assigning to the female character under mention the image of a face that I first saw during the early 1990s when I looked into a book that I had recently bought on the subject of horse-racing in New Zealand.

Snoo-motherfucking-ooze.

That said, Spain糖心传媒檚 (which, for the uninitiated, can best be summed up in this Los Campesinos! lyric, “we need more post-coital, and less post-rock, feels like the buildup takes forever and you never touch my cock”) went down in flames in the 2014 Real World Cup, so it is kind of fitting that the same happened in the World Cup of Literature.

But, Australia?! A country of poisonous flying spiders, jellyfish that are 100 meters in diameter, snakes that can kill you by looking in your eyes, and shitty Fosters beer? The best thing you ever did for literature was serve as the setting for an

Then again, you糖心传媒檙e playing Mexico here. A country whose players糖心传媒攖o steal Kaija Straumanis糖心传媒檚 糖心传媒淲orld Cup Taunt糖心传媒澨切拇綌hope for a green card every time the ref reaches in their pocket. Your Real World soccer team has never made it past the quarterfinals of a World Cup (failing again in 2014!), making you the least successful Spanish-speaking f煤tbol country ever. (Verified fact.)

Let糖心传媒檚 put aside the actual teams—and random uninformed jokes—for now and look at more of the book itself.

The basic argument for Barley Patch is that it糖心传媒檚 糖心传媒渋nnovative糖心传媒� and 糖心传媒渘ew糖心传媒� and 糖心传媒渆rudite.糖心传媒� Is Murnane a smart writer? Sure. Is Barley Patch new and innovative? Not in my opinion. Murnane is kind of a poor man糖心传媒檚 Gilbert Sorrentino (but without Sorrentino’s sense of humor) mixed with W.G. Sebald (but without Sebald’s universality).

If you haven糖心传媒檛 read about Barley Patch before, here糖心传媒檚 a basic summary: The narrator of this book has decided to stop writing. For 257 pages he tries to explain why he stopped writing by writing about things that he糖心传媒檚 written, writing about his relationship to books that he read in his youth, writing about his family, writing about images that have evolved with him over time, writing about how he糖心传媒檚 thinking about his current writing, etc. In between all of this, he asks himself “probing” questions, trying to move his narrative along in the most self-conscious way possible.

Spoiler Alert! This is all boring as shit. It糖心传媒檚 also one of the most self-fellating books I糖心传媒檝e ever read.

OK, time to blast away with a few examples, like the way-too-precious opening line, 糖心传媒淢ust I write?糖心传媒� NO. THE ANSWER IS ALWAYS AND FOREVER, NO.

This level of the book—wherein the narrator asks himself questions and answers them dishonestly—is super pretentious, and results in 糖心传媒渨riting糖心传媒� that is more or less Australian Lorem Ipsum:

Have I answered yet the question why had I written?

I would be willing to admit that I have not yet answered the impending question, but only if my hypothetical questioner would admit that a question can hardly be worth asking if its answer can be delivered in fewer than ten thousand words.

Murnane is the anti-Zen monk of world literature.

But even the straightforward parts of the book are uninspired. In a section that should be interesting since it糖心传媒檚 all about orgies and Black Masses:

The discussions at first were simple. The young man of the upstairs flat owned a copy each of several issues of the American magazine Playboy, which had recently been allowed into Australia after having been previously a prohibited import.

Holy Jesus it should not take that many words to say that! And “a copy each of several issues”? Like, if he had written “owned several issues of Playboy” anyone would糖心传媒檝e assumed he had a bunch of copies of the same one?

The thing is, Barley Patch isn糖心传媒檛 even a bad book糖心传媒攊t糖心传媒檚 just an incredibly boring one.

Let me kill off Australia’s last goal scoring chance with this:

Something that ought to be explained is my having begun again to write fiction only a few years after I had stopped, so I thought, for good.

Four years after I stopped writing fiction, my seventh book of fiction was published. Some of the book consisted of pieces of fiction that had been published previously in so-called literary magazines, but each of the other three pieces I had written in order to explain one or another of three matter that I could have explained by no other means than by writing a piece of fiction. One of the three pieces was intended to explain to myself and to readers of good will why I had become tired of reading book after book of supposedly memorable fiction and then being unable to remember, a year or more afterwards, any sentence of the text or any detail of my experience as a reader. Another of the three pieces was intended to explain to myself and to readers of good will why I had not been misguided whenever I had struggled from time to time during the previous forty years to devise a set of racing colours in which one or another arrangement of one or another shade of blue or of green explained about me something that could have been explained by no other means than by the appearance of a set of racing colours. The third of the pieces was intended to explain to myself and to readers of good will why I had stopped writing fiction several years before (and had presumably stopped again after having written the text that explained this) and to offer to readers of good will a hint as to what sort of project I now preferred to fiction-writing. [. . .]

I find myself now in a strange situation. Nearly sixteen years ago, I stopped writing fiction. A few years later, I wrote a piece of fiction intended to explain why I had so stopped. Now, more than ten years later again, I am trying to compose a passage of fiction that might explain my explanatory piece.

Just stop. Now. Zero goals! You’ve been Ochoa-ed.

*

Given all of that, and the fact that I read Barley Patch first, expecting to have my life altered forever by the brilliance of Murnane糖心传媒檚 images, only to be massively under-impressed, Faces in the Crowd simply had to not suck to move on to the quarterfinals.

And not only is it a trillion times more readable, enjoyable, less-pretentious, and interesting, it’s one of the best books I’ve read in 2014.

I go back to writing the novel whenever I糖心传媒檓 not busy with the children. I know I need to generate a structure full of holes so that I can always find a place for myself on the page, inhabit it; I have to remember never to put in more than is necessary, never overlay, never furnish or adorn. Open doors, windows. Raise walls and demolish them.

That’s how you write a self-reflexive, intellectual passage without coming off as someone obsessed with proving how brilliant they are.

Faces in the Crowd is a short novel with three storylines: one of a young translator working at a publishing house in New York obsessed with the poet Gilberto Owen, one of a woman in Mexico City writing a book about ghosts and young translators, and one of Gilberto Owen in Philadelphia dreaming of New York. It’s made up of dozens of short bits that collage, creating a million diverse, beautiful bits, and one complex whole.

Also, Valeria Luiselli gets a goal—or three—for being funnier than Murnane. This is a bit of a lame example, but the “author” in Mexico City writes a lot of suspect things about her husband, who occasionally reads her manuscript and gets annoyed. Like when she pokes fun at his obsession with zombie films.

I don糖心传媒檛 like zombie films. Why did you write that I like zombie films?

Because.

Please, cut the zombies.

Or a better example, in relation to Gilberto Owen’s way of defining people:

Owen would糖心传媒檝e said that he spoke with spelling mistakes.

If Barley Patch gets some love for being “new,” for exploring the lines between reality and fiction and how one transforms into the other, Faces in the Crowd gets another goal for this embedded explanation of its structure:

Not a fragmented novel. A horizontal novel, narrated vertically.

But the main point: Reading Faces in the Crowd is enjoyable and stimulating. Barley Patch deserves nothing. Unfortunately, a lot of the review outlets that seek out “innovative” literature seem to have given Murnane way more attention than Luiselli. I’ll red card that shit and redeem the Real Mexican team (and Robben’s god awful shitheel flop) by awarding a penalty kick.

Final result: 3-0 Mexico.

——

Chad W. Post makes people angry with his swearing, random insults, and dislike of fans of American soccer. Otherwise, he can usually be found reading or trying to buy rights to untranslated works of literature.

——

This match was judged by Mauro Javier Cardenas. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket.

In the year 2010, seventeen years after I stopped watching soccer, I wrote a paean to Your Face Tomorrow, claiming that 糖心传媒渉ere糖心传媒檚 the wonderfully parenthetical operations of a human mind in the 21th century,糖心传媒� a phrase that later became a blurb in Spanish for Your Face Tomorrow, which must have flattered fleetingly me since I糖心传媒檓 a frail human desperate for meaning, although the translation from 糖心传媒渨onderfully parenthetical糖心传媒� to 糖心传媒渕aravillosamente parent茅ticas糖心传媒� must have shorn a few branches from my twig of meaning because I would have been embarrassed if any native Spanish speakers heard me say anything like 糖心传媒渕aravillosamente parent茅ticas,糖心传媒� in any case the parenthetical mind of Jacques Deza, the narrator of Your Face Tomorrow, a mind that doesn糖心传媒檛 pay much attention to itself because 糖心传媒渉e糖心传媒檚 given up understanding himself,糖心传媒� shares its wonderful operations with us throughout 1,232 pages, during a period in Deza糖心传媒檚 life when he was delivering conjectural character reports for the British Secret Intelligence Service and was estranged from his wife Luisa.

Looking back at the passages from Your Face Tomorrow that I transcribed to my sketchbook in preparation for writing my paean to Your Face Tomorrow, I糖心传媒檓 not surprised I transcribed so many passages supporting my partisan fervor for digressions糖心传媒斕切拇綔digression is secular revelation,糖心传媒� Adam Phillips wrote糖心传媒攅specially when they were written by a Spaniard who translated Tristram Shandy into Spanish, and out of this abundance of partisan passages there糖心传媒檚 one from Volume II that I starred as most significant because, according to me, it summarizes the kind of fiction Javier Marias seems interested in composing, so here糖心传媒檚 that starred passage in which Deza糖心传媒檚 in the women糖心传媒檚 bathroom at a nightclub, searching for the wife of a client:

[I] had lost sight of my mission, it had simply got mixed up with a few other things: lines of poetry, images and inherited memories as well as a story, none of which managed to fill my mind entirely, because none was particularly pressing, but they were all floating around in there, perhaps waiting to be picked up later by idle thought糖心传媒攖hat is, by thought at its most active糖心传媒攁t the end of the day, when I finally went to bed.

Since the year 2010, I糖心传媒檝e often shared in conversation with my so-called friends two passages from Your Face Tomorrow: (1) Luisa telling Jacques please let糖心传媒檚 not live together ever again; (2) 糖心传媒淸O]ne never experiences genuine self-disgust, and it’s that inability that makes us capable of doing almost anything.糖心传媒�

(1) The anxiety about domestic life deadening human life, an anxiety featured in many pages of Javier Marias糖心传媒檚 A Heart So White, often surfaces in conversation among those who are no longer young enough to playact at wanting so-called meaningful relationships, and what I like to share with my so-called friends who are seeking so-called meaningful relationships, as a sort of literary relationship advice, is something like look there糖心传媒檚 this 1,232-page novel in which, at the beginning, the narrator is estranged from his wife, and, toward the end, when they reconcile at last (and here I exclude any mention of Deza assaulting Luisa糖心传媒檚 new lover with a sword and telling him to get out of town or else), the wife says to the husband please let糖心传媒檚 not live together ever again.

(2) Given the vast gap between our imperfections and our expectations of reasonable perfection, the question of how could we have possibly performed Sin A / Sin B, plus the question of how could we have possibly not known we were going to perform Sin A / Sin B, become central questions in (some) of our lives, or at a minimum we retrofit these central questions around our past Sins A / B, and in the case of Your Face Tomorrow (some of) the central questions that Deza contemplates are how could have Deza糖心传媒檚 father best friend betrayed Deza糖心传媒檚 father? 糖心传媒淗ow can I not know today your face tomorrow, the face that is there already or is being forged beneath the face you show me or beneath the mask you are wearing?糖心传媒� How could I have not known I was going to assault my wife糖心传媒檚 lover with a sword so I could get back together with her?

Arbitro ladr贸n, my high school friends and I would scream at the referee as we watched the Ecuadorian national soccer team miss yet another opportunity to qualify for the World Cup for the first time, arbitro conchaetumadre, heaping our juvenile arsenal of insults on the referee because one of our obvious consolations, the consolation of the often defeated, I suppose, revolved around placing the blame for our loss on the rigged ref.

Will I turn out to be a rigged ref because I come from a small, often defeated country? Does it make a difference that, since I left Ecuador in 1993, the Ecuadorian national soccer team has qualified for the World Cup three times?

If you come across a new genre, do you raise your hand?

Gerald Murnane has invented a new genre: fiction as 糖心传媒渞emembered imaginings,糖心传媒� mind as place (糖心传媒淭he far parts of my mind,糖心传媒� Gerald Murnane wrote in a letter to Teju Cole published in Issue 3 of Music & Literature, a literary journal that publishes more of my favorite artists per page than any other literary journal, 糖心传媒渉old for me the same sort of interest that far countries probably hold for travelers糖心传媒�).

Imagine 糖心传媒渁 far-reaching and varied landscape糖心传媒� that contains memories of characters from books, of imaginary racehorses and racecourses, in other words imagine the contents of Murnane糖心传媒檚 mind exiting Murnane糖心传媒檚 head and populating a landscape that Murnane then dedicates himself to contemplate through his sentences, a contemplation that thankfully does without psychological insight (because who doesn糖心传媒檛 enjoy a break from the murky diagrams of human motivation?), a contemplation that consists of unearthing patterns of images as a way to both architect the landscape and invent meaning, meaning defined here as (to quote Murnane from Issue 3 of Music & Literature) 糖心传媒渢he discovery of connections between things that previously seemed unconnected,糖心传媒� and now here糖心传媒檚 a relevant landscape quote from Barley Patch:

He had always thought of the images in his mind as being arranged somewhat in the way the names of townships were arranged on maps of mostly level countryside and that the images were connected by feelings in the way that the names of townships were connected by lines denoting roads.

Let糖心传媒檚 track the progression of one fragment of Murnane糖心传媒檚 pattern making in Barley Patch. The chart below, from left to right, tracks the pattern of images that emerges from King-in-the-Lake, the name of an invisible racehorse. Names of racehorses have a peculiar effect on the narrator of Barley Patch:

The sound in his mind of one or another name would often seem to denote not a mere painted toy and not even an actual straining, racing racehorse but a knot of what he might have called compressed mental imagery . . .

The name of the invisible racehorse leads to 糖心传媒渁n image of a man lying on the bed of a lake of clear water,糖心传媒� which leads to a poem by Matthew Arnold, which leads to the 糖心传媒渧iew that might have appeared to a man lying in the bed of a lake of clear water.糖心传媒� Follow the arrows to the conclusion of the pattern making: an imaginary contest in invisible racecourse.

I will wash my hands, I thought when I heard I was going to judge Marias vs. Murnane, I will let one of my guinea pigs choose for me and I will add a formal constraint to the pig proceedings so as to not appear unserious. Besides. I wouldn糖心传媒檛 mind being remembered as the guinea pig critic, or, as my compatriots might say, el cr铆tico de los cuys.

Alas.

In the year 2014, one year after I started watching soccer again due to my eight-year-old daughter was scoring 3 goals per game for her elementary school soccer team, I decided to reread Your Face Tomorrow for the purposes of this competition, hoping to relive the engrossing experience of reading Your Face Tomorrow in the year 2010.

Writing rhythmic prose is easy, apparently W.G. Sebald said to his writing students, and as I reread Volume I of Your Face Tomorrow I was dismayed to conclude rhythmic prose can be a decent cover for the unfurling of banalities. Deza complains that people like to tell everything, for instance, but instead of just writing hey people like to tell everything, he has to unfurl a banal rhythmic list of everything that people like to tell, 糖心传媒渢he interesting and the trivial, the private and public, the intimate and the superfluous, what should remain hidden and what one day will inevitably be broadcast, the sorrows and joys and the resentments,糖心传媒� and it goes on, all over Your Face Tomorrow these banal rhythmic lists. I don糖心传媒檛 approach fiction like a critic or a financial analyst, assessing the net flow of pluses and minuses per novel. I have a preferred continuum of fiction, and if a novel adds many pages to this continuum, as Your Face Tomorrow has done, I don糖心传媒檛 relegate that novel to my kitchen cabinets (I don糖心传媒檛 love any one novel by Stanley Elkin, for instance, but I love so many pages of Stanley Elkin). This is a goddamn match, however, not a vague intertextual pseudo-Jungian notion of fiction reading. Judgments must be made.

Who would want to compete against an Australian narrator who, as a boy, moved among the characters of the books he read, devising his own strict rules of narrative interference, unable to alter the course of the narrative but free 糖心传媒渢o take advantage of the seeming gaps in the narrative糖心传媒�? When one of the characters in one of the books he read abandons his wife, for instance, our Australian narrator knows that, from his 糖心传媒渟tandpoint as a shadowy presence among the characters,糖心传媒� he cannot reverse the character糖心传媒檚 decision. 糖心传媒淎nd yet, I was able in some mysterious way to add to whatever remorse he might have felt from time to time . . .糖心传媒� I like to think of myself as a shadowy presence among these 1,771 words, adding to my own remorse for ruling against a writer like Javier Marias who has added so many pages to my so-called continuum, unable to alter the course of this match, however, no matter how much I tried.

——

Excerpts from Mauro Javier Cardenas糖心传媒檚 recently completed first novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again, have appeared in Conjunctions, BOMB, Guernica, Antioch Review, and Witness. His interviews and essays on/with L谩szl贸 Krasznahorkai, Javier Marias, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Juan Villoro, and Antonio Lobo Antunes have appeared in Music & Literature, San Francisco Chronicle, BOMB, and the Quarterly Conversation.

——