Notes From The Rumpus Book Club email discussion group on this month’s selection, Roy Kesey’s Pacazo (that sticker on the cover says “A Rumpus Book Club Selection”):

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I finished the book this morning. I don’t really have all my thoughts organized on it yet, but I will say that this is a book that is going to rattle around in my mind for a long time to come – one that I am sure to return to eventually. There is a lot to be taken from this book – about history, about coming to terms with the past, about loss and guilt and the fragility of the mind, about language and communication.

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Pacazo has been a slow starter for me, but I am hooked now and will probably finish it later today.

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All this history is so completely fascinating to me. Even though my mom was Peruvian, and I’ve been to Peru several times when younger, I really don’t know much about it. I get glimmers of things…the reference to the Inca Cola (which really does look like pee and taste like bubble gum!), and then to other foods and the places! Places that I have actually been to, but am ill equipped to describe because they were so long ago and I didn’t hold onto the memories as I should have. I know I must have a picture of myself in Huancayo…I wonder if I could find it. I wonder why didn’t they teach me more? Kesey mentions that haze, and Lima was always so hazy…as soon as I read these things I smile.

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The writing style of Pacazo reminds me of The Sound and the Fury, with an unreliable narrator whose narrative goes back and forth in time. I had been taking the intertwined historical narrative as maybe an attempt to block out the horror of his present situation, or maybe to find parallels that would give his loss more significance. And I wonder at the presence of the housekeeper, who has his wife’s name, and her living with them, and how he calls her “coincidence.” This seems very rational of him, particularly as he is gathering broken heels and other pieces of trash in an attempt to find “evidence” that will shed light on the murder.

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Kesey is certainly saying something about the creation of historical narratives, and that we constantly quest to find the origin of an event.

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A few among us, myself included, have been less than interested in the historical narrative. but i keep reading and now it fits.

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