NOVELS
The Unwritten Music of Life
A composer struggles to capture an elusive melody, while a violinist improvises music reminiscent of her youth. Their paths intersect, drawing from parallel wells of memories. Set against the backdrop of historic Prague, music reveals the emotions of their past—a time that has vanished, leaving only traces in their minds' dusty rooms. They each confront the music of their formative years: joy, fears, abuse, and displacements. In their quest to uncover the source of their memories, music emerges as the key to understanding. Jazz provides the freedom for melodies to merge, and an ancient map of Cuba points to the origin of all notes. Together, they navigate the unwritten music of life.
In The Unwritten Music of Life, music and silence divine memory. Armenteros’s synesthetic maelstrom becomes both voice and metaphor. A classical composer, Nicanor, finds himself in search of missing notes. Neva, violinist/muse, may have a clue. Their languid narratives (respectively 1st and 2nd person) obliquely reveal childhood specters and their own enigmatic relationship. This is a ‘large’ book, a joy to read, and worthy of much contemplation. The prose is lucid and often poetic. There’s mystery, animation, and quest; a right amount of magical realism, veiled eroticism, anomie and much personification. A refrain, “nothing and everything”, nods to Sartre. Perhaps most salient, Armenteros, who happens to be a psychiatrist, offers an exquisitely sustained portrayal of mind. He evinces music’s direct access to the unconscious. Ultimately, Neva’s electrifying improvisations (like psychoanalytic free-association?) afford her a kind of peace with the past that Nicanor may then reach for.
– Lauri Robertson, author of ...& Tremolos
Like Kieslowski’s film Blue, Jorge Armenteros’s novel The Unwritten Music of Life speaks directly to music’s mysterious core. In the debate between absolute music, in which music can only be understood based on music itself and maintains its elegant stance in the ineffable, and program music, in which “literary” dilutions suggest that music can be paraphrased in words and translated into narrative and symbol, absolute music wins. And yet: because of listening closely to “Composition No. 33”, a narrative between a composer and a violinist, between a woman, a river, Prague and Cuba, past, present and future emerges here in clear, concise elegant language. It only happens in the moment. “I am starting to think that the soul of sounds cannot be recorded”. Armenteros's novel is one that rewards the closest of readings.
- Leonard Schwartz, author of Actualities
Published by Spuyten Duyvil Press
The Curvature of an Absence
At the edge of a vanishing sea and under the light of a fading sun, two writers struggle to understand the sudden absence of affective and natural elements from their oblique lives. As they seek a beautiful but rather elusive presence, they are forced to confront that which is no longer there. To unravel the mysterious absences, they embark on the improbable project of writing a book in parallel, a book that should aggregate their souls and yearnings. Their erratic journey produces a book that reveals nothing and everything, but above all, that reflects the ardent light of a nascent understanding.
“The Curvature of an Absence, set in an unnamed coastal village, contemplates the nature of what no longer exists (or doesn’t yet exist). But this is really a point of departure for a questing narrator who, while in conversation with the likes of Rilke, Cortázar, and Bolaño, uses words to dust for fingerprints left by various aspects of the universe—the presence of absence, the architecture of a passing moment, the strange forces that bind friends and lovers. In spare prose that is quietly lyrical and languidly hypnotic, Armenteros makes much of little in this fable-like landscape that seems to inhabit an eternal present.”
--Vincent Czyz, author of Sun Eye Moon Eye and The Christos Mosaic
“What if you were to go to the shore one ordinary day and find that the sea is gone, absent. what if that literal absence calls forth as it were the jinn of absence. What if the only way to answer the questions that absence proposes is to work with a friend writing “parallel” books, novels. what might yours look like? How might you answer absence, as though it were a question? This life-challenge that Jorge Armenteros poses in the brilliantly conceived structure of his complex surreal motif — recalling the intellectualism of Camus and the terror of Kafka — becomes a quest for meaning in a void at the heart of the human condition. It is at once comic absurd bleak. And a joyous journey to deny nothing and to love doing so.”
--Martin Nakell, author most recently of consciousness and saltearth airstone waterbody
Published by Spuyten Duyvil Press
We Are Not But We Are
Mirroring our times, this is a fictional account of a man who, upon crossing a street, enters an irregular universe where purposefulness is only apparent. Instead of dealing with a single possible reality, he begins to accept the alluring indeterminacy in stochastic or random processes. His meditative search breaks the arrow of time and leads him to conceive of the world as having alternating layers of causality and chaos. He finally sees his own reflection in the expressionless face of a woman whose chant helps him break the circle of fate.
Published by Spuyten Duyvil Press
Touch That Which We Cannot Possess
Starting from its mysterious crib in 17th century Venice, a violin journeys through the New York City subway and the concert halls of Europe in the hands of a contemporary string quartet. It searches for its identity, a chance to touch immortality, and its ever-eluding object of desire. Narrated from the violin’s point of view, the novel shows how a violin deals with contemporary questions of power and inequality: Can evil and marvel coexist as one? Can the desire to destroy turn into a desire to love within seconds? How are the sounds of human bodies different from the sounds of instruments? Should we use the same notes to write the music of immortality and the music of love? And from the hands that play the violin to the hands that abuse it, we finally discover who plays whom.
The Spiral of Words
An intrepid writer undertakes a long walk towards the ocean where he hopes to source the essential and immortal words he yearns for. Along the way, he traverses the streets of Nice, Lisbon, Cádiz and Marrakech where he confronts the shapes and shadows that harbor his inner fears and desires. His reality then collides with the elliptical passage of the mythical man in the striped tunic. The two minds create a spiral of words spawning a narrative that emboldens the writer and unearths the past of the striped tunic. With this novel, the STRIPED TUNIC TRILOGY comes full circle. The two previous novels are AIR and THE ROAR OF THE RIVER. The sense of words and language as primal utterance in this trilogy shows the American mindset refracted into many other peoples in this now world.
The Roar of the River
Set in a perched village of the French Alps, between a roaring river and the moonlight, a man dressed in a striped tunic seeks refuge from his dying past. Instead, he encounters an iconoclastic set of characters that offer him love, instigate fear, explore the meaning of language, and elicit revenge. Following the musical structure of the 17th-century fugue, the narrative voices succeed each other until coming together in a polyphonic search for light among the darkness of their origins.
AIR
The strange and unexpected behaviors of the four main characters reveal the illusory idea of trying to apprehend one’s identity. Imena, a student of perfumery, arrives in Marrakech in an attempt to free herself from the overbearing intensity of her boyfriend Patricio, a philosophy professor at l’Université Paris-Sorbonne. She takes residence behind the red door of an allegorical hotel whose attendant, the striped tunic, officiates life under an aura of mysticism and danger. René, Patricio’s junior colleague, decides to leave for Guadeloupe in search for his gender identity, a painful and transformative search that delivers him beyond himself. After Imena secludes herself in her hotel room trying to complete her ultimate perfume creation, the four individual lives finally coalesce in the courtyard where four flowering orange trees witness the thaumaturgy.
The Striped Tunic Trilogy
Originally published sequentially as AIR (2016), The Roar of the River (2017) and The Spiral of Words (2019), the trilogy has since been collected into a single volume.
The Book of I
The Book of I is the story of Teaston, a painter struggling with schizophrenia, who finds himself at the edge of a cliff, at the edge of his life. The novel explores our fragmented human nature through the distorted lens that Teaston provides. Some characters are undoubtedly real while others become figments of Teaston’s imagination, yet others defy authorial certitude by remaining in a sort of reality twilight. As metaphorical vehicles, the themes and characters in the novel raise questions about the nature of identity. And from under a chorus/amalgam of voices and delusions, Teaston raises to discover what it means to be a person, what makes us human.
The narrative is undoubtedly influenced by the formal spontaneity of Cortazar’s Hopscotch, the shifting levels of reality of Kafka’s The Trial, the iconoclastic characterization of Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, and the interiority and lyricism of Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
The Book of I received Honorable Mention in the 2015 ILBA for Best Novel in the popular fiction category.