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I have a tendency to include references, appositions, and other errata in my text as I write. As I realize that not everyone cares for such digressions, however, I generally "hide" them in scripts. To access this "additional information," just click on the boldfaced text. To expand all errata at once (brave soul!), click here.

 

 

 

Returning to A by Dorien Ross (1995)

20 April 2008

Being a writer myself (much more so than a critic, anyway), my tendency with novels is to be generous. Let's face it: the creation of any novel is a feat of endurance on the scale of the superhuman. This puts me in awe from page one. Dorien Ross's Returning to A is no exception: from the book's opening pages I'm drawn in and transported—spatially, temporally, culturally. This said, Returning to A can be a bit uneven at times. What's striking, however, is the peculiar way this unevenness comes full circle. Let me explain.

Returning to A is a fictional account of a young woman's turbulent love affair with Flamenco music and life and with the Spanish gypsies that create it. It begins with a teenager’s trek to Andalucía in the 60's and spans, at irregular intervals, some untold decades of discovery, loss, and grief.

And there is an emphasis on grief.

As both a flamencophile and bibliophile, it was a bit hard to know at times how to take (i.e. how to read) this book. An introductory note makes it clear that this book is a work of fiction which has been elaborated out of the author’s own experience. Ross writes that while in the 1960's and 70's she did live and study with the gypsies of Morón de la Frontera; she also writes that, "as a writer, [she has] invented freely" in the creation of this text.

Returning to A gives a subjective account of a specific historical period and location. "Subjective" is the key word here. Anecdotes of particular flamenco figures are sprinkled throughout the text, but this is finally a story about the novel's protagonist, Loren. Flamenco is used to reveal her character. The inverse is not necessarily true. We (as readers) do get the occasional (perhaps too occasional) character sketch of the gypsies who shape Loren's experience, but these sketches are more akin to sideways glances than they are to fully elaborated portraits.

However much I might want them, such portraits are evidently not the point of Returning to A. This is fine. But as the novel progresses, I find that even the narrative threads connecting Loren to the book's events have a tendency to wander further from the proverbial path than one might like (or could easily track). Some of these threads end up at dead ends. Some simply peter out: A mythical guitar, "the feather," is introduced at length—then never mentioned again. Loren's deceased brother, Aaron, plays a recurring grief-o-centric role through most of the book, but is conspicuously absent from the closing chapters.

This unevenness, I think, is part of what sends the narrative at times from the passionate over into the maudlin. Aaron, for instance, tragically overdoses on nitrous oxide. For those of you who haven’t been to the dentist lately (or whose dentist isn't as cool as mine—I hear not all offices have the stuff free-flowing into the waiting room), nitrous oxide is commonly known as "laughing gas." I find this otherwise bare detail hard to digest with a straight face. Returning to A is symbol rich: when an important character overdoses on laughing gas, I need to know what to do with this symbol; I need an explanation (otherwise I have a hard time chasing some very un-tragic images from my head).

There is also an account early in the novel wherein Loren, at the end of her first year of lessons, "had surpassed [her] first teacher." Great. According to her narrative, though, this teacher then "[gives her] his guitar, and with that giving, [gives her] the wind" (19). As a guitar player who has both taken and given lessons—and known many others who have done the same—I cannot honestly even begin fathom this scenario. It is very romantic, yes, but it nonetheless stretches my suspension of disbelief to the maximum (if not the breaking point).

Caveat: I of course realize that of all the events in the book, these two—the brother and the given guitar—are probably the most likely to be "true"—if only because they're too inexplicable to be "made up." These are actually two of relatively few places where I would call Ross's craft into question. Perhaps she is writing "real life" as fiction. If on the page, however, such "real life" doesn’t stand up well among its fictional peers, it seems to me that its "truthfulness" isn't going to be of much use.

By now you've undoubtedly got the impression that I don’t like this book. This is actually not true. Returning to A, in its very tendency to wander and in its general unevenness, captures something that I suspect is very distinctly flamenco gitano. The round-aboutness that I’ve been (admittedly round-aboutly) getting at here—both in the book and in flamenco—eludes other forms of experience. Flamenco, in my experience, doesn’t come in the standard pre-packaged way the western consumer culture stooge expects. It is not direct. And it is very personal.

For me, then, a satisfying read of this book requires a shift in my frame of mind. Once I allow this to happen, Returning to A does a good job of getting me out of my skin. And as a western consumer culture stooge myself, I need this as often as I can get it. This novel shows the turmoil, both social and cultural, that is at the root of flamenco. It also shows—perhaps unintentionally—flamenco's melodrama: the book is at times very melodramatic—as is, in my experience, flamenco. There is a readerly abandon that is required here that is at times (though perhaps not always) refreshing. It may make the uninitiated cringe, but flamenco—gypsy flamenco, anyway—is not for the uninitiated.

Nor has it ever meant to be.

 

 

 

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