Writing

Llámame Brooklyn

by Amanda Rivkin

Tuesday February 7, 2006

Llámame Brooklyn (Call Me Brooklyn)
By Eduardo Lago.
Destino,
397 pages, 19.50 euros.

Eduardo Lago’s ambitious debut novel, Llámame Brooklyn (Call Me Brooklyn), begins in the same place it ends: a remote cemetery in Fenner’s Point, Brooklyn. Death is the constant thread throughout a novel in which one young writer must complete the novel of Gal Ackerman, an older and recently deceased friend.

Drawing somewhat from the techniques of the imaginative Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, who passed away last year, Lago brings an imaginative cast of supporting characters into Llámame Brooklyn. Some of the more unique personalities include Nadia Orlov, the daughter of two Siberian physicists forced to seek asylum in America in the 1950s, Felipe Alfau, a Spanish writer living in New York who writes in English, and an expert on Kurdish rugs.

While Llámame Brooklyn is an extended meditation on New York in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, there are ruminations on the beauty of Lago’s native Madrid as well.

The most playful aspects of Llámame Brooklyn are acted out in Lago’s inventive structure. In acknowledgement of the process of writing and the amount of time that went into Llámame Brooklyn, Lago teases the reader with small epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter that say things like, "[Original text from 1972. Revised by Gal Ackerman in February of 1992.]"

One young writer must finish the novel of his older friend by conjoining the pieces of a novel that lay fragmented across a Brooklyn motel room. These scenes are heavily existential and undoubtedly a reflection of Lago’s own efforts as a writer.

In an additional game for the reader, Lago names Ackerman’s fictitious novel, Cuadernos de Brooklyn or Brooklyn Notebooks. Our protagonist is led to observations like, "Reality ceased to exist for me," when confronted with the humdrum of a creative existence. Lago appears to be addressing the complicated issue of structure in his own novel.

There are not many Spanish novels that address exile in the form Lago has chosen. While Lago says that he himself is not in political exile or an exile in any traditional sense, he still feels a need to be close to his native Spain through art and literature. In Llámame Brooklyn, Lago’s young protagonist is an orphan of the Spanish Civil War and is brought closer to his past through revisiting the legacy of Brooklyn’s Lincoln Brigades. Additionally, many of the minor personalities that appear in Llámame Brooklyn are exiles who arrived in the U.S. in privileged positions as intellectuals and asylum seekers.