A Pleasure

(Note: at the time of writing I am only halfway through the book, so whatever I write here is purely provisional).

Spanish is a beautiful language. It is a language meant to be written in, and spoken, and sung and read aloud. It is the language of over 400 million people, and it is as rich and varied as those people. It is rare, and wonderful, to find an author who writes in English and who can bring the joy and feel of Spanish to a page. By this I don't mean the language, of course, the two are too different, but in his "The Jaguar Smile" Salman Rushdie is able to communicate the feel of Nicaragua in the 80s, or so it seems to me.

The book is a travel book, a book about a journey. This is important: in journey books, the author is a spectator, they visit a place and they recount what they see and who they meet. The author is not the centre of the action, they just describe what is happening around them. Although they will give a personal perspective on everything, most journey books are about places and people, and less about events. Salman Rushdie visited Nicaragua for three weeks in 1986. Of course, by 1986 he had already written Midnight's Children and he was (to say the least) well known. He probably didn't have much trouble arranging to meet whoever he wanted. This possibly gives a rather eschewed perspective: he seems to travel around the country with government officials, something that surely wasn't as common as the book seems to intimate. He also keeps meeting poets and writers (although, as one of them puts it, everyone in Nicaragua is a poet until they prove the opposite), and generally always seems to be surrounded by important people. But somehow he manages, through his prose, to reflect what Nicaragua must have been like in 1986, a country at war, a country violent, a country hopeful.

From what I can glean, Salman Rushdie spoke little (if any) Spanish when he visited Nicaragua. He needed to be surrounded by people who spoke English, or otherwise he wouldn't have managed. This is another way the view of the country might have been eschewed, but it doesn't feel like it was. He seems to willingly join in with the natives, going to church services in Spanish and dancing salsa after a few drinks. I suspect that he was happy to be in Nicaragua, in a way that only people who travel can understand, he was free.

The most striking scene in the book is probably when a fellow writer, a poet, approaches him (approaches el (¿al?) escritor hindú) and tells him that he admires Tagoré. Rushdie is surprised that Rabindranath Tagore is mentioned in Central America, wonders why this man knows Tagore at all. The poet explains: Victoria Ocampo. And Argentina, of course, comes into play. Many people ignore the power of Argentina, and to ignore it is to ignore the power of the Spanish language. Victoria Ocampo was an Argentine intellectual, and foremost, an editor. She read Tagore and loved him, so she had him translated to her language. And so it was that Salman Rushdie found that Tagore (or Tagoré as the Nicaraguan poet called him) was more read in Central America than he was in his native India. Possibly the most human moment in this conversation, the one that drives it home, that makes it feel truly Central American, that reflects why Spanish is such a beautiful language, is when Salman Rushdie says to the poet: "Then Tagore is better read in Latin America than in India", and the poet responds (but you have to hear the response, gentle, chiding, in Nicaraguan Spanish): "Tagoré".

I am hugely enjoying "The Jaguar Smile". It's a lesson on history, politics and Central America. But first and foremost, it is a lesson in writing.