But again what interests me here is the same thing that interested me in my other novels: to work with different genres not by approaching them, but by bringing them into my territory. Thus, the rock-and-roll novel in Esperanto, the foreigner-trip-in-Mexico novel in Mantra, and the coming-of-age novel in Kensington Gardens. And thus the futuristic novel (even though, really, it’s a futuristic novel that’s more preoccupied and occupied with the past than with the future) in The Bottom of the Sky.
Thus, a novel whose working and work-in-progress alias was Tsunami and its original and mysterious premise—initial note in a notebook—was, merely, “woman devastates three men like a tsunami / love story / SADNESS!!!”
Thus, a novel that was written slowly over the course of several years that, now, seen with perspective, seems to me much more nonfiction than fiction. Too many things happened and at full speed. Many good and very happy things, a few very sad things. Something that—though inevitable and impossible to edit and correct—remains partially true: it isn’t bad, every so often, for what happens on this planet to be imposed over what happens on that planet where writers spend much of their lives.
I worked a lot too. And I moved. To another world. A better world than the one I inhabited; which doesn’t imply that the voyage hasn’t been exhausting. And don’t ever forget it: when a writer moves, his library also moves. And, in case someone is interested, the twilight landscape that the dying extraterrestrial from Urkh 24 ceaselessly watches is none other than the sunsets of Vallvidrera with views of Montserrat out the circular and oh so 2001: A Space Odyssey window of my study where I am writing all of this.
Thus, a novel in which I worried a great deal about finding a certain “language” to tell it in, knowing that, in general, science fiction doesn’t care as much about style (apart from the honorable exceptions of Philip K. Dick and J. G. Ballard and a few others) as it does about the plot, about the “idea,” about the “future” it proposes.
And if there’s something that always bothered me about classic science fiction it’s that hardwired need to explain absolutely everything (even that which is known to be unexplainable, mysterious, that which is better left as pure and unattainable mystery), with that didactic and almost fundamentalist zeal, with those irrepressible desires to lead the way and to be right and to win, wanting so badly to get first place in a race to the future that, of course, has no finish line.
The Bottom of the Sky, I think, concerns itself with something else. Not so much with making the implausible seem plausible but—Cheever again, in an interview—to work with “moments” and not “plots.” It seems to me that, in his day, Stanley Kubrick—too bad he was weighed down by Arthur C. Clarke—opted, fortunately, for the same approach.
To put it another way and availing myself of another particular cinematographic gaze: on the planet where The Bottom of the Sky takes place, the rockets and space shuttles don’t take off from the flat fields of a place called Cape Canaveral, but from the sinuous slopes of a place known as Mulholland Drive.
“I don’t work with plots. I work with intuition, apprehension, dreams, concepts,” John Cheever explained to a reporter from The Paris Review.
Ditto.
So The Bottom of the Sky has traveled a great deal and has tried on too many spacesuits before feeling comfortable and satisfied with the one it wears now, with the one it floats in now. The Bottom of the Sky had—at some point—many many more pages and was for a while a novel with a much more historic and encyclopedic personality (a more or less close relative of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, to offer an example); but there was something that didn’t agree with me there that, though I enjoyed reading it, I wasn’t interested in writing.* Nor—going to the other extreme on the spectrum—was I interested in having The Bottom of the Sky evoke the certain inexplicable alien strangeness of several novels by Haruki Murakami where nothing gets explained. So there were various failures to launch before, finally, taking off and understanding where this novel should go.
And now I’m so happy to have arrived . . .
“Writing long is like reading, while writing short is like writing,” someone says near the end of The Bottom of the Sky; but I’m the one who says to say it.
And it doesn’t seem a coincidence to me that the most constant and powerful part of the process of the writing of The Bottom of the Sky—which, for a while, shared space with the writing of another now-finished novel and with three others in different stages of development—coincided with the period of time beginning with the death of Kurt Vonnegut and ending with the death of J. G. Ballard, with the death of David Foster Wallace in between.
May they rest in peace.
And now—when at last, coming back, I land and remove the space suit—my gratitude to all those who watched over my vital signs while I floated so far from home but confident that they were near and dear to this book.
In the launch tower: Juan Ignacio Boido (head reader), Jonathan Letham (who recommended specialized bibliography and told me the anecdote that triggered this novel), Francisco “Paco” Porrúa (who ceded books from his Barcelona library) and Juan Sasturain (who brought me books in Guadalajara from his library in Buenos Aires).
Always orbiting nearby: Carlos Alberdi, Eduardo Becerra, Ignacio Echevarría, Nelly Fresán, Alfredo Garófano, Norma Elizabeth Mastrorilli, Alan Pauls, Guillermo Saccomanno, Enrique Vila-Matas, the Villaseñor family.
In the control room: Agencia Carmen Balcells and Gloria Gutierrez and Javier Martín, Marta Borrell, Mónica Carmona, Marta Díaz, Andreu Jaume, Claudio López Lamadrid, and Editorial Mondadori. And my foreign editors and translators, for the patience they’ve had with me and, I hope, they patience they’ll have with me again.
In the outer space: Dante Alighieri, J. G. Ballard, John Banville, Donald Barthelme, Franco Battiato (those verses of “Milky Way” where you hear “Noi / provinciali dell’Orsa Minor / alla conquista degli spazi interstellari / e vestiti di grigio chiaro / per non disperdersi” I always found very moving), Blake Bailey, The Beatles (“A Day in the Life,” that sound, one more time) Ray Bradbury, Adolfo Bioy Casares for the Morelian projections and reflections (“the sky of the consciousness,” “it will be an act of mercy”) that are here activated, Jarvis Cocker (and his “Quantum Theory”), Leonard “The Little Jew Who Wrote the Bible” Cohen, Lloyd Cole (Love Story in general and the particular version of “Traffic” that appears in Cleaning Out the Ashtrays), Philip K. Dick (“How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”), Bob Dylan (“The ghost of ’lectricity howls in the bones of her face,” of course, and the novelty of non-stop, as I write these lines, from Together Through Life, another of those B. D. albums that—in his oh so sci-fi way—it is impossible to know when it was recorded, impossible to tell if it comes from the future or the past), Mark Oliver “Eels” Everett (and his father), Denis Johnson, “Big Sky” by The Kinks (for obvious reasons), Stanley Kubrick (for still more obvious reasons), David Kyle, David Lynch, Robert R. McCammon, Norman Mailer, Héctor Germán Oesterheld, Michael Ondaatje, Pink Floyd (Wish You Were Here could be considered the head album of The Bottom of the Sky and it always seemed to me the perfect soundtrack for a private and domestic science fiction film), John Prine (that one verse from “Lake Marie”), Mark Rothko, Rod Sterling, Cordwainer Smith (Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger), Theodore Sturgeon, “Dream Operator” by Talking Heads (something like the equivalent to “Lara’s Theme” in The Bottom of the Sky: “Her Theme”), James Tiptree Jr. (Alice B. Sheldon), François Truffaut (and everything is said), John Updike and his Toward the End of Time, David Foster Wallace, Dennis Wilson and “Time” on his Pacific Ocean Blue, Warren Zevon and “The Vast Indifference of Heaven.”
And beyond winks and blinks and flickers more or less fleeting and maybe imperceptible if you don’t have a good telescope to capture that not-dead but, yes, somewhat-crepuscular starlight of childhood readings—when the future was The Future—that distortedly arrives to this book.
The first part of The Bottom of the Sky admiringly resuscitates a line (the one about the dog of time) and some circumstances from Tokyo Doesn’t Want Us Anymore by Ray Loriga, plays with a Marcel Proust quote, and abducts and rewrites a couple scenes that originally appear in The Wapshot Scandal by John Cheever and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut.
The second part of The Bottom of the Sky, on the other hand, references a story of mine—“La usurpación de los cuerpos” [“The Usurpation of Bodies”]—written by Miguel Ángel Oeste (thanks, Miguel Ángel) for FreakCiones: 6 peliculas, 6 mutaciones (Centro de Ediciones de la Diputación Provincial de Málaga, España, 2007) and included later in the French edition of La velocidad de las cosas (La vitesse des choses, Les Éditions Passage Du Nord/Ouest, 2008).
The third part of The Bottom of the Sky winks at and modifies my favorite line from Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño.
I’m grateful too for the information—utilized or not, but always nutritious and inspiring—contained in the books Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, Ghost Wars by Steve Coll, L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman? by Bent Coydon and L. Ron Hubbard Jr., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick by Philip K. Dick and edited by Lawrence Sutin, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World by Thomas M. Dish, The Futurians by Damon Knight, Medea edited by Harlan Ellison, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons by George Pendle, The Way The Future Was by Frederik Pohl, Murasaki edited by Robert Silverberg, Divine Invasions by Lawrence Sutin, The Bradbury Chronicles by Sam Weller, Only Apparently Real by Paul Williams, The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, and The Twilight Zone Companion by Marc Scott Zicree.
And, more than thank you and, after all, always at my side, traveling across the universe: Ana and Daniel.
And greetings to all of you, out there.
We’re not alone, thanks for coming back to be with me, and we’ll see each other soon, I hope, in another world that’s in this one.
R. F.
Vallvidrera, Barcelona
May 1st, 2009
* Somewhere, in another dimension much like our own, there’s another novel called The Bottom of the Sky—I read it because I wrote it, I made it disappear—where, among many other things, it records in detail the composition of each and every one of the sci-fi fan clubs in 1930s New York; it details various missions and military movements during the Iraq war and offers profuse descriptions of the life in Bagdad’s Green Zone (Green Area, Grynarya); you can read a complete version of Evasion and it follows Mark Rothko’s career step by step as well as listing the necessary requirements for joining a popular religious-freak organization.
Rodrigo Fresán is the author of ten works of fiction, including Kensington Gardens, Mantra, and The Invented Part. A self-professed “referential maniac,” his works incorporate many elements from science fiction (Philip K. Dick in particular) alongside pop culture and literary references. According to Jonathan Lethem, “he’s a kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller, the kind who brings a blast of oxygen into the room.” In 2017, he received the Prix Roger Caillois awarded by PEN Club France every year to both a French and a Latin American writer.
Will Vanderhyden received an MA in Literary Translation Studies from the University of Rochester. He has translated fiction by Carlos Labbé, Edgardo Cozarinsky, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Juan Marsé, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Rodrigo Fresán, and Elvio Gandolfo. He received NEA and Lannan fellowships to translate another of Fresán’s novels, The Invented Part.
Inga Ābele (Latvia)
High Tide
Naja Marie Aidt (Denmark)
Rock, Paper, Scissors
Esther Allen et al. (ed.) (World)
The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim & a Life in Translation
Bae Suah (South Korea)
A Greater Music
North Station
Svetislav Basara (Serbia)
The Cyclist Conspiracy
Guðbergur Bergsson (Iceland)
Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller
Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès (World)
Island of Point Nemo
Per Aage Brandt (Denmark)
If I Were a Suicide Bomber
Can Xue (China)
Frontier
Vertical Motion
Lúcio Cardoso (Brazil)
Chronicle of the Murdered House
Sergio Chejfec (Argentina)
The Dark
My Two Worlds
The Planets
Eduardo Chirinos (Peru)
The Smoke of Distant Fires
Marguerite Duras (France)
Abahn Sabana David
L’Amour
The Sailor from Gibraltar
Mathias Énard (France)
Street of Thieves
Zone
Macedonio Fernández (Argentina)
The Museum of Eterna’s Novel
Rubem Fonseca (Brazil)
The Taker & Other Stories
Rodrigo Fresán (Argentina)
The Invented Part
Juan Gelman (Argentina)
Dark Times Filled with Light
Georgi Gospodinov (Bulgaria)
The Physics of Sorrow
Arnon Grunberg (Netherlands)
Tirza
Hubert Haddad (France)
Rochester Knockings:
A Novel of the Fox Sisters
Gail Hareven (Israel)
Lies, First Person
Angel Igov (Bulgaria)
A Short Tale of Shame
Ilya Ilf & Evgeny Petrov (Russia)
The Golden Calf
Zachary Karabashliev (Bulgaria)
18% Gray
Hristo Karastoyanov (Bulgaria)
The Same Night Awaits Us All
Jan Kjærstad (Norway)
The Conqueror
The Discoverer
Josefine Klougart (Denmark)
One of Us Is Sleeping
Carlos Labbé (Chile)
Loquela
Navidad & Matanza
Jakov Lind (Austria)
Ergo
Landscape in Concrete
Andreas Maier (Germany)
Klausen
Lucio Mariani (Italy)
Traces of Time
Amanda Michalopoulou (Greece)
Why I Killed My Best Friend
Valerie Miles (World)
A Thousand Forests in One Acorn: An Anthology of Spanish-Language Fiction
Iben Mondrup (Denmark)
Justine
Quim Monzó (Catalonia)
Gasoline
Guadalajara
A Thousand Morons
Elsa Morante (Italy)
Aracoeli
Giulio Mozzi (Italy)
This Is the Garden
Andrés Neuman (Spain)
The Things We Don’t Do
Jóanes Nielsen (Faroe Islands)
The Brahmadells
Madame Nielsen (Denmark)
The Endless Summer
Henrik Nordbrandt (Denmark)
When We Leave Each Other
Wojciech Nowicki (Poland)
Salki
Bragi Ólafsson (Iceland)
The Ambassador
The Pets
Kristín Ómarsdóttir (Iceland)
Children in Reindeer Woods
Diego Trelles Paz (ed.) (World)
The Future Is Not Ours
Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer (Netherlands)
Rupert: A Confession
Jerzy Pilch (Poland)
The Mighty Angel
My First Suicide
A Thousand Peaceful Cities
Rein Raud (Estonia)
The Brother
Mercè Rodoreda (Catalonia)
Death in Spring
The Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda
War, So Much War
; Milen Ruskov (Bulgaria)
Thrown into Nature
Guillermo Saccomanno (Argentina)
Gesell Dome
Juan José Saer (Argentina)
The Clouds
La Grande
The One Before
Scars
The Sixty-Five Years of Washington
Olga Sedakova (Russia)
In Praise of Poetry
Mikhail Shishkin (Russia)
Maidenhair
Sölvi Björn Sigurðsson (Iceland)
The Last Days of My Mother
Maria José Silveira (Brazil)
Her Mother’s Mother’s Mother and Her Daughters
Andrzej Sosnowski (Poland)
Lodgings
Albena Stambolova (Bulgaria)
Everything Happens as It Does
Benjamin Stein (Germany)
The Canvas
Georgi Tenev (Bulgaria)
Party Headquarters
Dubravka Ugresic (Europe)
Europe in Sepia
Karaoke Culture
Nobody’s Home
Ludvík Vaculík (Czech Republic)
The Guinea Pigs
Jorge Volpi (Mexico)
Season of Ash
Antoine Volodine (France)
Bardo or Not Bardo
Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven
Radiant Terminus
Eliot Weinberger (ed.) (World)
Elsewhere
Ingrid Winterbach (South Africa)
The Book of Happenstance
The Elusive Moth
To Hell with Cronjé
Bottom of the Sky Page 22
