When Derrida decided to analyse friendship, he started fromAristotle’s sentence: “O my friends, there is no friend!” and from there he deconstructed our notion of friendship.
When Butler decides to analyse friendship, he does is from the vital de-structuration that comes with time. People change, our number of friends decrease and there’s one point in life when you ask yourself how long is it going to be before those that were your friends long time ago (mainly due to geographical reasons) become to be just acquaintances whom you may or may not exchange an awkward civil goodbye.
“Strange, I thought to myself right then, how his life was like my own and yet not at all like it, though we came from the same small place on earth”
Four friends. Four different lives. Any one better than the other? Probably not. But, as a matter of fact, the life of the rock star (freely based on Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, a childhood friend of Butler) seems to be the one that most captures our attention, the one that most seduces the characters in the book. They wonder how must be his life, a life so different from theirs; how must it be to be travelling all over the world all year round; how must it be to have all those amazingly beautiful women by your side (“I wondered what it would be like to touch her body, to be with a woman that beautiful”); how must it feel to be able to escape from the village. A village that quietly chains all its inhabitants, that charms and oppress them in equal measures, that spreads its long tentacles to claim them back to its side because, besides Henry, all the others, at one point or another, had tried in vain to run away from it. The outside world they met sent them bruised and hurt back to their roots.
In this choral novel in the sense of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom or Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Butler gives each chapter to a different character so they can show us their reality from his/her point of view; so they can show us that there is not a single reality but multiple interpretations of what we understand as “reality”. The words, the intonations, thoughts and readings of the world that every person does are different. To translate them into a novel is to place a mirror in front of society. And, precisely, that’s one of the main virtues of Butler’s text: its verism.
Shotgun Lovesongs offers a portrait of realistic characters, people close to us that opened up their wounds to show us the growing distance between them. How Kip doesn’t get on well with neither of them: how Henry and Beth, who have been together all their lives, face the ghosts from the past; how Lee’s unfinished love for Beth doesn’t weaken… but, above all, how the all-strong friendship between Lee and Henry is about to collapse. Because that, friendship, is the main topic of this book: beyond the existential doubts that assaults any one on his/her thirties, beyond the loves and breaking ups, the weddings and divorces, the jobs and the economical failures, the kids and the frustrated maternity, the broken illusions and the paths never chosen that haunts us for ever more, it is a book about Friendship. Nothing else. ThatButler’s narrative style is flawless, reaching poetry points at occasions, rough on the edges in others, but agile and straight to the point always, it only aids us to embark on this travel to our common roots.
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