EL VIAJE A BUDAPEST

i do remember why i was interested in daniel barredo's debut novel when i first came across it at the librería beta across from the mall and the stadium on eduardo dato. it was the title: its recondite yet patent reference to a trip that i'd taken myself, on which i found myself caught in the delectations of my greatest lie, the story of which i've always been more than happy to recount after having tested the waters with my stories of (first) the activist jeweler and (then second) the prostitution ring of istanbul (top stories eight, six and seven, respectively). i don't, however, remember how the book was displayed -- if there was a copy with its cover facing out from the shelf or if i came across it by its spine -- but once i'd seen the cover i would have known that it had won a prize -- the premio andalucía joven de narrativa for 2011 -- which would have alerted me somewhat to the...situation...of the book or to the author's environs, even if i hadn't then (or before that) read the back cover or the inside flap. still -- or anyway -- i didn't buy it, because i had more than too many books that already needed to illegally cross the guadiana (and that would need to cross it again), and too many more that needed to go (from wherever) illegally through customs. so i had my sister buy it (where i'd seen it again at the casa de libros on gran vía) when she visited madrid in september, and the copy she bought me finally made its way to me in december. the rest is procrastination.

but when i did finally read it i read it with interest, and with an only slightly begrudging envy. the title of el viaje de budapest was what piqued my curiosity about the book, but what fixed and held my interest was the acuteness of my reaction to what i understood to be its contents. how to react when someone else has written (and has had published) a book that you might (you now so strongly suspect) have written about your own life -- or, as it might more probably be, the novelized version of the salient events and aspirations of your life that would have made for the best reading. i, for my part, was interested...in this case...by way of a self-aggrandizing regret (at seeing what might have been my story written out from under me) and of the ongoing renascence of my youth lament (...of my youth). el viaje a budapest is of a type; but within the rubric of the new bildungsroman, which i will critically define (for the purpose of this particular digression) as the creative crisis of our current quarter life crises -- the millennial (generation's) questioning of how to respond to the wilting of the millennium's spectacular promises of progress or success -- the novel is atypical (at least millenially). maybe. or, maybe it's just a sexually explicit rehash mashup of the catcher in the rye and on the road for those of us fed up with trying to fix things and who never found much to sympathize with in salinger or kerouac.

from the beginning of his first person narrative, the character of daniel (daniel barredo's likely protagonist) is fully formed. he's thirty years old, and he's utterly resigned to the inertia of the status quo. he's well educated and diversely credentialed, but he's already had enough of being frustrated with what his masters degrees don't ever seem to end up getting him. he has, in other words, already come of age in an era when education and credentials lead, as often as not, to some combination of unemployment, casual sex work and the plot of "office space." and daniel has already made the resolute decision to drop out. as el viaje a budapest begins, he's already past the point of do or die. the question that daniel barredo addresses in his book is how, then, it should be done.

and how does daniel do it? like so many of the protagonists of so many bildungsromans (new and old) with literary (or, more widely, "artistic") appeal, daniel is a writer. but whether or not his oeuvre has been fully realized, or whether or not anyone could gauge the relative height of his literary powers from what he demonstrates in this one book, haven't been important to the realization of the character of the poet. daniel is, simply, a working artist, and his work consists primarily of submitting his poems to as many competitions as possible. what he wins at the competition in castilla la vieja in the opening pages of the first part of the book isn't a huge sum, but it's enough for a month of rent, a cartridge of toner, forty cans of tuna, two packages of pasta, a kilo of kiwis, another of bananas, fifty bags of green tea and another month of membership at the gym. the fifty euros left over he'll use for submitting to twenty-five more competitions. if he needs food or cash before his next check he'll steal from the supermarket or rent himself for a night to one of the wealthier matrons of granada. when he isn't reading, writing or working out, daniel likes to be fucking, and -- if you can take him at his own word -- he's quite the fucker, whether or not he's getting paid. a modern day criminal saint in the spirit of genet? daniel gives all of zero shits who cares.

still, i'll go on record as saying that my interest in his story turned out to be less sympathetic than (aspirationally?) interrobang once i actually got to reading it. "rosario's cunt," it begins, "was as vulgar as those tins of anchovies in sunflower seed oil that they serve at the bars along the highway." her breasts, however, are distractingly massive. ("big enough that they could have suckled the entire continent of africa.") and although i've personally no taste for breasts or cunt of any variety, i was immediately in love with the freedom and color barredo's vulgarity, which is as bald as the husband that rosario presents to daniel after she's presented him with his four hundred euro prize. within five pages, daniel has lied to rosario to get her over to his room (someone had forgotten to sign the check, he tells her), and to make up for his embarrassment at cumming so quickly after she'd gotten his dick between those crocodile teeth of hers (he'd opened the door with his pants down), he goes down on that "monstrous" thing between her legs. he doesn't get around to saying so explicitly for another few dozen pages, but it's obvious well before then: the explication of the monstrous is daniel's only aspiration, his thanks for all of the lies he himself has been told and for all of his wasted years.

he also makes a trip to budapest. a singer-songwriter friend of his is going there to play. an old fan of his who teaches spanish there has gotten him two shows -- and has gotten the school where she teaches to pay for the whole trip. daniel wouldn't mind going too ("cheap booze, tidy, blonde vag, the danube..."), but he hasn't got anyone to pay his way. he doesn't like it, but he isn't surprised. it isn't just singer-songwriters. soccer players, basketball players, cyclists, engineers, pimps, drug dealers and even all those daddy's girls and boys could take a trip to budapest whenever they felt like it. but not a writer like daniel. so he goes home with the woman who's been talking him up at the bar where his friend, also a bartender, has been passing him free drinks. she forgets her promise to help him out with seven hundred euros by the next morning, and when she finds out that he's taken seventy from her purse (as a consolation/security the night before) she gets upset. daniel smashes some things on the way out. the woman's banker husband finds out that daniel has been at his house from a surveillance tape. when daniel tries to preempt to preempt the development of further complications by visiting him at his office, he offers daniel the seven hundred that his wife promised him plus two thousand more if daniel will promise to testify to the wife's infidelity in court without letting anything on to the wife that might help her prepare a defense. daniel accepts the offer, takes the money and then extorts another thousand from the wife before making his travel plans.

to gather that daniel barredo has positioned the character of daniel the poet at explicit and fundamental odds with late late capitalism (and particularly the mutant successor of european neo-capitalism) requires absolutely no interpretation. the late quarter life crisis being experienced and described by the protagonist of el viaje a budapest is a material one. his socioeconomic condition, however, doesn't seem to have ever influenced his desire or ability to create. and although the story that daniel the poet tells gives no sense of the content of his poetic output (other than what assumptions we might make by the association of daniel the poet with the poet and novelist daniel barredo), there isn't (otherwise) any reason to assume that it would have anything necessarily to do with the content of his story. (we might, however, hope that it had been praised for the refinement of its vulgarity.)

daniel's struggle might be against tradition, but it isn't against the traditionally vague existential discontent that typifies so many narratives of its type. the novelty of the creative crisis being narrated by daniel the poet lies in its separation from the poet's process of creation. his primary concern in el viaje a budapest is the maximization of his attainable means. as far as his means to create go, it's enough for him that he be able to keep reading and writing. (all the better if he can take a trip to budapest when he wants -- but probably none the worse for maintaining his critical line if he can't.) but man cannot live on art alone. the artist has to eat, and the volatile essence of art is only edible in midwestern urban renewal slogans. at the same time, the actions that daniel takes -- and, more often, the speech he makes -- against the system he sees as having frustrated his opportunities for financial success are less subversive than they are their own creative subterfuge for exploiting that system from the bottom up. his crisis isn't over the reality of his poetry (or the state of poesy within the state of spain, or the european union or the world) so much as his (self-)obligation to play the part of the jilted, contrarian poet in order to stay one.

as a result, what begins as a speed the collapse, pre-apocalyptic rebellion of the fringe against the forces that have thwarted its social mobility increasingly becomes a kind of inverse candide the further that daniel continues his charge. as it's being asked about the met's punk fashion exhibition: "does infiltration corrupt, or do the corrupt infiltrate?" (is that right?) and i don't say so to shore up daniel's opposition, although by the end of el viaje a budapest (by the middle of the second part, really), daniel had lost me. he's made it to the hungarian capital, and he's narrating now in the present tense. he says a big, drunk fuck you to the ugly edifice of the academy at a reception following the first of his friend's shows and he meets a girl in a bar.

she's nineteen. she speaks spanish. a modern witch who's been collecting her tears since she came to the city at thirteen so that she could someday water a world of roses! ...or something like that. (a tidy blonde? i don't remember, but daniel can't get the smell of her not at all monstrous cunt out of his head.) a witch and an angel! she lives on the outskirts of the city with an old alcoholic beggar who was a professor of philosophy in bosnia before the war. his turtle descartes lives with them too. she dumpster dives for food and paints on trash. some of the stuff she finds in the garbage she refurbishes and resells. daniel falls under her spell. it seems to be enough for him now simply that he's gotten out of spain. there were also some troll fairies that filled up his corpse after he "died" on the plane. the girl knows about fairies too, and daniel somehow manages conversations with the alcoholic about kierkegaard in broken english. paradise amid the worst of all possible worlds! then he goes back to granada, sells the pot plants that he's supposed to be taking care of for a friend and it's on the road with the girlfriend, happily ever after.

i don't know what the fairies did to him, but after daniel makes it to budapest el viaje a budapest loses its teeth. maybe neither spain nor budapest represent anything specific with regard to daniel's transformation. his transformative flight from his point of origin to his destination could just mark a more general forsaking of stagnation. "when life is an adventure, the only thing that matters is the air. and to fly," daniel says at the end of the book. but even if that weren't just too easy, too cutesy it still would be. it turns out that daniel the poet is no saint genet. he's both more indulgent and less. he's resigned to his situation on either side of his flight, but his resignation in spain was more compellingly indignant, more revolting late youth in revolt. then he goes to budapest, loses himself, as it were, then sidesteps the issue of his role in the situation of his origin and beds down with a teenager. and although her age might only have been intended as a symbol of youthful innocence determined and uncorrupted against the odds, at the point of her appearance in el viaje a budapest, it made me reconsider daniel's interactions with all of the women in the book.

in retrospect, they all appeared marked by an obvious machismo. daniel doesn't show a bit of respect to the women he fucks in spain, which seemed less questionable when his disregard seemed more total. then he goes to budapest, where he gets softer, but he also gets selective. he utterly disregards the spanish woman hosting his friend, but he showers respect and praise on his piece of untrammeled strange. could his love song with the teenager be the threnody of his youth lament? or a role reversal in which the party to the relationship who should be wiser starts to follow the lead of the party who should be more ignorant of the world? sure. but daniel is proud of his physical prowess, and he likes to bring it up wherever he is. (before he goes home with the banker's wife he scoffs to himself at a comment she makes about not liking muscles. he's sure that she's just trying to set herself up to stiff him after they've done the deed. she, after all, is nothing in comparison.) could his relationship with the teenager then be something less magical and more traditionally domineering? the dressed up fantasy of a simple ego stymied in its expansion? displaced shame? the less i was enamored of el viaje a budapest, the more i wondered if that weren't the case. come this far, daniel's poetry is barely noticeable where it stands beside the point.

but that's probably an issue of my own. i remember why i was interested in reading daniel barredo's book. and the book didn't ever disinterest me as i was reading it. but, all else aside, the superficial summer of love style hopefulness that ended it just seemed hopeless. i'm glad that danieal barredo kept things vulgar, but i wish he hadn't concluded them so civilly. daniel and his teenager aren't trying to fix things, but they aren't ultimately fucking them either. that's no trip to budapest! it certainly wasn't mine. and that wouldn't matter, i guess, to daniel barredo, but it does mean that my story (that story of mine) is still safe. i can still write my own long grift novel, and it can still be representative of our crisis. ours! which one? oh dear! that's the crisis. and the novel in crisis (as crisis). as it was in the beginning and ever shall be! (it's the same story.) the rest is procrastination. then you come across another book that someone wrote about you and that stirs the crisis of digression. luckily, sociological criticism is outre. good thing, because this forgot to take it somewhere. because we're all too resigned to fucking and being fucked. so go fuck yourself. that was the big lesson. q.e.d. go to budapest. get yours. just make it vulgar. they'll come.