What is this? A man with a hat and a mission, that’s what this is

Jonathan and I landed softly in the Netherlands where, recently, we celebrated the wedding of my nephew Daan and the wonderful woman in his life, Annerie. Returning ‘home’ always comes with catching up, but since we don’t know what home is anymore, we don’t quite know anymore either what to catch up with.

That said, I have looked into becoming a volunteer and I have resumed my studying of Portuguese. As a former foreign language teacher I know better than anyone that learning another language means putting in the hours of studying and memorizing, and that’s where I am at.

On our trip I lost myself in drawing, an activity I want to pursue further as it is much more relaxing than writing. This one I did on the plane, while watching a movie and listening to music. I could never do that and trying to write.

But now we have also come to the elephant in the room: the Portuguese novel I tried to pitch to American agents, (and much less sporadically so, to English and Dutch publishers). I have said it before, but as writers we are our own worst PR people/agents, so pitching something is very different from delivering a manuscript. Rejection I can deal with, but not making the cut coz, maybe, something is not good enough is a harder pill to swallow.

Mind you, my dissertation, a biography of the American novelist and journalist Hamilton Basso, which was published with LSUP, was rejected at first but accepted after I added more. My first creative book was a slam dunk and maybe the most successful commercially. The book after that, and my proudest achievement, was a long road with both an American and a Dutch publisher. I then wrote a novella that was a complete and utter rag that I self published, and the textbook that came after that while working at UC Berkeley was the easiest of all. Yet all books required a process, rewrites, changes in direction, and every book came with rejection of some sort. Getting somewhere creatively, I used to tell people, is not just talent, but talent + perseverance + timing. The key component of getting there, however, the key pillar is dogged perseverance.

When I left Leonor (see previous blog entry) in that museum in São Paulo, I really thought I was done. No more books. But letting go of that writerly identity and the joy, the mental joy that writing still gives me has left me stranded with the nagging doubt that I have one more book in me, one last book. Ideally, it should be my best book as we all want to go out with a bang.

My Portuguese novel came to me in a covid dream and it came fast, as if the words were dictated to me at times. But now I know this story needs a framework, a personal voice(over) that will also tell the story of my own double exile as I emigrated to the US from Europe and then migrated back to Europe … as if, in the end, the dream, the mere dream of feeling at home somewhere was in Europe all along. And let’s not even over inflate it, let’s not call it a dream but a real thing, like a sense of place and belonging.

Since the sixteenth century more Portuguese men have left Portugal than Irish men have left Ireland, so migration, traveling a far way in search of one’s destiny is a theme of the novel, but also the overbearing theme of my own life. And whereas the characters in my book all (except for one) left Portugal, I landed in Portugal to embrace, in all its glory, what they left behind and missed so much. In a sense, by inserting myself (in what I could call a move of reverse migration), I’m finishing the story for them, and myself, or so I hope.

How I am going to layer this in a way that will entice the reader is still like groping in the dark, but I do want it to be rich and savory. A book that has the rings of a tree where each ring tells a different story but also adds to the overall story of the tree. A book that consists of different voices, forms and feelings, and a book in which a dirty joke may be as important as a recurring image or theme. Less linear, but a work in which a reader will have to embrace the chaos and the mess, in order to get the reward: just like life. And naturally, the kind of book you want to finish, but the kind of book you miss once you’ve finished it. Arghhh! Easier said than done.

But I have to give it a last shot, a last push, as Leonor told me in that dark museum in São Paulo. So back to the drawing board and no more blogs about how I can’t deliver on this final book of mine. I’m going to be laser focused and do whatever the hell I want to do with this revamped manuscript. Sort of like this man which I drew in São Paulo, from a picture, in yet another museum.

When it rains, we should all grab a banana leaf, ignore the nay sayers along the road, and head out into the storm.

FINIS