The Piano Cemetery by José Luís Peixoto
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Communion of Sometime Sinners

I find myself enthralled by the literature of small countries - Portugal, Ireland, The Netherlands in particular. This is a fact but certainly unintended and unplanned. What is it I ask myself that is so captivating? I suspect it has to do with the emphasis many writers from these countries seem to place on what might be called the magnificence of the quotidian, the celebration of things at hand, making the otherwise trivial into objects and events to be appreciated. Perhaps I’m projecting. In any case, Peixoto is a master of the beauty of the everyday and the mundane and the mis-shaped. How else to judge this poetically revealing prose?

The morning light doesn’t feel the clean window panes as it passes through them, coming to rest on the notes of the piano that emerge from the wireless and float in the kitchen air.

…or this?

...the telephone screams. Strong as iron, it stretches out with a persistent urgency, which stops to catch its breath, then carries on again with the same panic and the same authority.

The Piano Cemetery is a sort of multi-temporal inter-generational meditation about love and family life, both of which subjects hinge on the prosaic and often trivial being raised to the dramatic. There are some unusual devices that Peixoto uses to energise the drama. Dead men talking, because dead men have no time and can see everything. Death can be liberating in that way: Father can then be son who can then be grandfather. An Olympic marathon runner whose life, and a large part of his father’s and his son's, maintains him on pace during a race in Stockholm, presumably in the 1912 Games (at which the legendary Jim Thorpe also competed).

The usual assortment of ‘distressed types’ which populate much of Peixoto’s work are here: the grotesquely fat sister, the half-blind uncle who tells endless incomprehensible tales, the Italian piano player on the razzle, the frequently abusive men, women both dark eyed and fair-haired, all of whom are long-suffering, and of course the eccentric carpenters, Francisco grand-pere, pere et fils, who are the interchangeable protagonists: "We are perpetual in one another."

The race is the trajectory along (within?) which the runner's “reflections constructed out of guilt” ramify in a sort of segmented stream of consciousness kilometre by kilometre from generation to generation. Augustine may be right. Sin and guilt are somehow genetic. "My memory is me distorted by time and mixed up with myself - with my fear, with my guilt, with my repentance," he says as he interleaves time and space. Guilt and repentance not just for things done intentionally but most passionately for those incidental accidents that shape a life; ultimately guilt and repentance for simply being and reality is "the same truth in different illusions."

This is powerful existential stuff in which the question of who is it that exists is made central by the technique. Peixoto knows a great deal about children and old people, particularly about their peculiar sense of time and sense of connection with others. His use of ambiguity of narrator very effectively captures this other way of seeing. Perhaps small countries more than others do indeed promote these kinds of thoughts.

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