A Diversion

As I look through the novel Valparaíso, I’m not yet convinced that it’s a good candidate for serial posting. The narrator’s search for his brother Alex in Valparaíso essentially alternates with chapters telling what happened to them earlier, beginning in their youth. While I sort out this question, I thought I might launch a small diversion, which I suppose falls under the “occasional commentary” mentioned in my first post.

Here in Mexico, the word diversion (diversión) is most often encountered on a sign while driving, indicating a roadblock due to construction or an accident, and indicating (hopefully) the alternative route you can take. On the other hand, divertido is much in use, in the sense of “amusing” or “entertaining,” but “diversion” is used less frequently in our sense of “idle distraction”.

But if the first chapter of a novel invites the reader into a place, characters, activity - a world - a current of authorial decisions concerning language, tone, register and voice courses below that, shaping the journey the reader is embarking upon. Much as a painter prepares a canvas with gesso, primer, undercoat. Yet no matter how much writers labor over these opening strokes, the book to follow will inevitably subvert them. Graham Greene wrote somewhere that, upon reaching the end of writing a novel then going back and rereading the first chapter is as if encountering something written by another person - and that in a sense this is true, because by the end of the novel the author is another person. Writing a book changes you.