Solstice Reading
A journey with Valzhyna Mort
Dear readers, happy midsummer! I’m finding it so interesting to be in Berlin, where it doesn’t get “dark” per se until 11pm, such that the other night at 10:30 I went for a walk in the park, and it was not only light enough to read, but the whole park was overrun with rabbits. The rabbits were small and frolicsome, with white tails, and bounded in front of me as I was walking. Then I came to a lawn area and there were five more rabbits hunkered down, looking cute but also sinister. This gave me a sudden, vague, yet insistent memory of a Julio Cortázar story about which I could remember nothing except an ominous surplus of rabbits. Luckily, if you google “Cortázar” and “too many bunnies,” it comes right up: “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” (Spanish here, translation here).
As soon as I read the first lines, I remembered when and where I had encountered the story: it was in a Cortázar collection that I received as a gift, in my first year of college, from a guy I had a crush on (the prototype of Ivan in The Idiot). Naturally, at that time, I had read each story with care, to try to figure out what he meant by giving me that particular book. The narrator of “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” has a condition where he periodically vomits bunnies (conejitos). Then he’s staying at his friend Andrée’s apartment, while she’s in Paris, and writes her this letter. Without wishing to spoil this suspenseful work of magical realism, the effect of the bunnies on the property is not what most property owners, or even renters, would consider positive. What I remember taking away from the story is: “He really hates his friend—he’s really angry at her, behind all the flowery language,” and it gave me a scared feeling.
Meanwhile, I am still in book lockdown and rarely leaving the apartment… but I did make it to the Berlin Poetry Festival, to hear Valzhyna Mort give the annual Berliner Rede Sur Poesie, which was amazing and inspirational, and which also exists as a beautiful bilingual (English and German) book, titled “Long Lines, Long Days: A Prose Poem.” It’s a text that she started writing in Italy in June 2023, it’s very time-specific to these long days and short nights. It was really moving to hear her read it on such a bright evening, a week before midsummer, in a church-like hall that turned out to be a former crematorium.
Anyway, I bought the book and later at home I typed out the passages that I found the most resonant. That’s what I’m sharing after the paywall: a few of the quotes, plus my notes about why I found them resonant. (3000 words)
Thanks for reading!
