Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend?
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
At first it’s hard to see, but then you can’t not see it. On the cover of the Spanish edition of the latest novel by Rodrigo Fresán to be translated into English, there’s a ghost letter that appears and disappears, depending on the light and the angle. The letter e at the end of a word that rings out with all the power of literature: Melville. Just that here, the title is Melvill, the surname of the father of the author of the celebrated (though not in the moment of its publication, in 1851) Moby-Dick, to which (they say) his wife added the ultimate e after his death in an attempt to elude his creditors. On the cover of the new English edition, on the other hand, the e appears cut off or, rather, as if it were falling off the precipice of the edge of the page.
And Melvill is, in part, a book about ghost letters. About letters that appear and disappear, about deliriums that must be scribbled down before they are melted by fever, a novel like a ghost ship that carries the precious cargo of literature (and music, and art, and film) inside it, something that, with the coming and going of the years and the books, has become more than a trademark of Fresán’s ever-dazzling body of work.
Melvill is, among other things, a novel about a son not understanding his father and attempting to write him. Rewriting him a thousand times. Inventing him (or, as we read on one of its pages: “A son telling the tale the father will never tell”). A novel about the immense ocean (of great depths and teeming with mysterious creatures) that is a father-son relationship and the past (of the father) and the future (of the son) that will never belong to the one or the other (and maybe for that reason must be invented and dreamed and remembered). That son who begins as a footnote to his father, only to later—in a marvelous moment—raise his voice and come above deck, finding the literary style that’s both his inheritance and the father tongue that we all must learn to speak (though we may never master it entirely, like a foreign language for which our dictionary is missing many pages); a story told between deliriums (or, in the words of the novel: “Telling [because really it is always the children who end up writing their haunted parents while those parents read them fairy tales] how the voice of an immense delirious father tells: with no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.”)
And the thing is, unlike the son Herman—so good at telling and recounting—the father Allan always failed when it came to giving accounts and especially when it came to accounting. And so he died drowning in debt and bound to his bed, amid fever and deliriums, with his young son (maybe already dreaming of becoming a writer) taking notes at his feet. Or that’s how Fresán imagines it. And he rewrites another, apparently minor scene from Allan Melvill’s life: one night, dreaming of returning home after so much time spent running from everything, Herman’s father decides to walk across the frozen Hudson River. A beautiful and terrible scene that, in the novel, is refracted into numerous reflections on the relationship between paternity and writing (the book as a son, but also the son writing and rewriting his father to configure his own father tongue) and on literature (the books of Herman Melville and of so many other writers like a whale to hunt, or like a wave that always brings in so much). And the thing is that even though the story is divided into three parts, as tends to happen in the Fresánian universe (“The Father of the Son,” “Glaciology; or, the Transparency of the Ice,” and “The Son of the Father”), actually, like that novel Moby-Dick and its ship the Pequod where everything and everyone seems to fit, what we have in Melvill is a definite world that contains the infinite.
Herman rewrites and narrates things from his father’s accounting notebook, expanding on and turning them into a fiction, a “two-headed dream.” From the delirium of the father to the delirium of the son, the farewell of the first part is rewritten in the third. From the biography of the father that is composed (and challenged at the same time) in the first part, moving in the second part through a delirium told in islets of ice, in icebergs, in glaciers shaped like asterisks, to the third and final part, wherein, exhausted and ecstatic, the son assembles and disassembles himself, assembling and disassembling the whole world along with him. A novel about the ghosts we carry with us and the frozen rivers (that memory of the ice that preserves all things) we sometimes walk across.
That memory that invents and dreams.
Because maybe the memory of or from childhood is the first work of anyone who decides to write—that often capricious selection of memories we all must (dis)assemble, so that other memories can come later, including the memories of the books that save us.
Melvill carries literature inside it like precious cargo. (Fresán’s books are always books that read, that read other books and themselves; his last book, a triptych comprising The Invented Part, The Dreamed Part, and The Remembered Part, is a veritable monument to literature and to the wondrous act of literary creation, as are The Bottom of the Sky and Kensington Gardens and all his other books that are not yet translated into English but available in all their glory in Spanish.) Not just the literature of Melville (with his Moby-Dick and Bartleby and Redburn and Clarel and Pierre and so many others), not just the literature of the United States (that country also described here as “a nation that sometimes reminds me of a great white whale and others of an immense mad captain: hating each other yet knowing themselves inextricable from and indispensable to the other for the colossal birthing of a country”), but the literature of the world (and so, for example, it has echoes not just of Nathaniel Hawthorne, a kind of mentor to whom Herman Melville dedicates Moby-Dick and who turns into another ghost, but also of James Joyce: from Dubliners to Ulysses. With a father who is searching for a son, and vice versa. A father who needs a son to rewrite him and a son who is learning to write his father.
Fresán’s novels aren’t written in Spanish. It’s not true that they’re translated, like now, from Spanish into English and many other languages; his novels and stories (and columns and reviews) are written in the language of literature, with masked quotations dancing their own dance at their own party so that readers recognize them and acknowledge them with a little bow. The ship as the world and the leaving of the world behind, taking the world along with it. A Noah’s-ark cargo to survive all floods.
Melvill is a novel full of parentheses and footnotes that, like Captain Ahab hiding for days in his cabin before finally coming above deck, take a while to climb up onto the page and challenge and expand on what’s been told onboard.[1] Like the nautical term quick-work: the submerged part of the boat that keeps it afloat. Or like instructions for walking across the ice, first one foot and then the other, mutating into “Listen, Herman: first one foot(note) and, making sure the ice won’t break, only then the other.” Parentheses functioning like glimpses of new ships laden with treasure. And if there is something that Moby-Dick teaches us, and that is echoed in Melvill, it is that a ship can always turn into a hearse and a coffin can save your life so that you live to tell the tale. And that sometimes the words we need to hear (or to invent) come to us only in a delirium.
And, maybe, in that way, one can learn to read one’s father.
To write him.
In and from death.
(Herman Melville adds, from the Great Beyond: “For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. And the drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a last revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell.”)
To read Melvill is to remember all the mentions of the writer that appear (I use the verb on purpose regarding this novel full of phantasmal apparitions) in Fresán’s work. All the cameos of the wrathful Captain Ahab, all the glimpses of that whale (white or not). But also: all the ways a powerful obsession can be narrated. In a way, those of us who have followed Rodrigo Fresán’s work closely were always waiting for it. A small piece, yes, but a perfect one, within an enormous, sophisticated, and ever-expanding machinery. One of those small yet indispensable pieces that set the world in motion. A marvel of a distinct scale (considering the size of the author’s preceding novels—Melvill is “only” 309 pages). A crystal ball with an ocean inside it.
In Melvill, Fresán has once again built a world that contains all worlds (ghosts and vampires included, opening the door to the supernatural, which colors the memories of the father’s “White Delirium” and his encounters with Nico C.). A novel that makes us travel in time (in all times at the same time, from the thaw and from literature), prompting us to cast off voraciously for the life and the work of Herman Melville, peering into that whaler where all the lights are always ablaze. (Once again, in Moby-Dick: “In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of queens. To dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whale-man, as he seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He makes his berth an Aladdin’s lamp, and lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest night the ship’s black hull still houses an illumination.”)
Melvill is an illuminated (like those medieval manuscripts: always conjuring comments and annotations) and illuminating novel. It “houses an illumination,” indeed. You emerge from it with different eyes—eyes that, upon rereading, remember and return to that ship (no longer the Pequod, but the Rachel) that carries the ghost of a lost child and eventually rescues from the sea another kind of orphan. One who, by living to tell his tale, makes memory and makes family. Conjuring a life to be told like a ghost ship that glows in the dark.
Rodrigo Fresán has written another unforgettable and important book, one of those books whose reading should be marked with a transparent stone. With endless imagination, singular style, and enormous generosity, Fresán offers us a new opportunity to return to literature (his own, that of Herman Melville, and that of so many others) in all its marvelous and challenging brilliance.
(How lucky we are.) 
[1] My one footnote, I promise: In Melvill’s long acknowledgments section (another trademark of Fresán’s work), the author explains that the idea for this novel was already planted in the third part of his triptych, The Remembered Part. In a way, with this gesture of taking something small (the mention in the previous novel, something written as a footnote in Melvill), expanding on it later, and bringing it up on board—it becomes new treasure that, in The Remembered Part, also appears inside parentheses and in a different font.
María José Navia is the author of two novels, four collections of short stories, and one children’s book. She holds an MA from New York University and a PhD from Georgetown University, and currently works as an assistant professor at Chile’s Pontificia Universidad Católica. Some of her work has been published in English in World Literature Today, Latin American Literature Today, and The Brooklyn Rail.
Will Vanderhyden has translated more than ten books of fiction from Spanish. His translation of The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán won the 2018 Best Translated Book Award. Vanderhyden’s work has appeared such journals as Granta, The Paris Review, Two Lines, Future Tense, and Southwest Review, and he has received translation fellowships from the NEA.
