Fresh, Green Life, the latest novel from Sebastian Castillo, opens with two epigraphs, both from Rainer Maria Rilke: “You must change your life,” from the poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” and “Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody,” from Letters to a Young Poet. The collected letters from Rilke to the cadet Franz Kappus are full of weighty advice from a world-weary poet not yet thirty, eager to impress upon the younger man the correct model for living. He preaches the inward turn, silence and retreat from the world. In the years leading up to the first World War the two men exchanged a number of letters in which Rilke is insistent on the importance of these virtues if one would seek the artistic life. In the end the advice was not enough, and Kappus did not follow his counselor into the literary canon. The Letters are published sans his contributions and the result is Rilke’s voice only, dictating to a void. Nobody, he says, can help you. Nevertheless, he is willing to try.
Sebastian Castillo has something Rilkean about him. That is, Sebastian Castillo our narrator, not Sebastian Castillo the novel’s author, and not Sebastián Castillo the fictional Catalan writer with whom our narrator shares a name. The narrator has taken a vow of silence, following Rilke’s advice, not speaking with anyone for one calendar year. During this time, he has excused himself from employment as an adjunct professor and has all the essentials delivered to his front door. He leaves his apartment only to go to the gym. After 364 days of this monastic existence, he receives an invitation that tests his resolve to shun the outside world.
The entire novel takes place over the course of one New Year’s Eve night as Sebastian journeys to the suburban home of an erstwhile college professor for a holiday party. There he hopes to affect a reunion with Maria, his former classmate and the object of his undeclared undergraduate affections. Her presence is teased by their host, Professor Aleister, a fustian, domineering lecturer who poses to his charges questions like “whether a person could be considered a student unless they had been fucked in the ass by their teacher.” It is to this man’s presence Sebastian is willing to submit, so eager is he to meet once again with Maria.
She is newly divorced from a man named Andrei Rublev, the same name as Sebastian’s favorite movie, though the coincidence has soured him on the film. With Andrei, Maria had built a life perfect for Instagram, frictionless, picturesque and materialistic. She has long abandoned her collegiate interest in philosophy, “a trifling though admittedly diverting joy,” and literature, the original grounds for her friendship with Sebastian. While she moved on he did not, pursuing a MFA in creative writing and becoming a person who lives through books. Nor has he moved on from his crush. The two have kept in touch online and his flame is tended to via messages, comments and reactions. When he announces the publication of his first novel, he feels “an intense satisfaction verging on delirium, when I saw that Maria was one of the first people to like the post.” That novel, 57 Colombian Novels, is a doppelganger of 49 Venezuelan Novels, the real debut from the living Sebastian Castillo.
Fresh, Green Life is divided into only two chapters, each composed of long paragraphs that go on deep and winding tangents. The narrator moves from memory to reflections on literature and philosophy to the virtues of weightlifting and back in a wry, bookish voice reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard. His deadpan tone belies a timorous anxiety at being perceived by the world. Where Castillo’s previous novel, SALMON, was metafictional and whimsical, Fresh, Green Life is bleaker and more grounded in our world. The plucky narrator of SALMON has been replaced here with one more disenchanted with life and with literature. Sebastian’s expectations towards life have never been clearly defined, and yet they have failed to have been met. He is something of a dilettante but he perseveres with literature, reading perhaps so as to become the kind of person who is well read. His flagging sense of optimism is rekindled with the promise of a second chance with Maria.
Certain facts mentioned so far may incline the reader to apply the label “autofiction” to Fresh, Green Life. Popularized by writers like Ben Lerner and Karl Ove Knausgaard, the term is appropriate on a surface level but not much deeper. Yes, the narrator and author share a name, they both live in Philadelphia, and the fictional Sebastian’s debut is a stand in for Castillo’s own. However, Castillo’s work is too clever, self-aware, and carefully fashioned to be only the dramatization of the author’s day to day life. The function of the self-insert here is to draw attention to the theme of doubles and parallels which runs through the book. Like the character named Andrei Rublev, the insertion of doubles produces an ironic friction caused by the differences that emerge beneath the surface level similarities. The doubling forces us to consider the pair in comparison, but their contrast produces the tension and uncertainty upon which the story can play. Sebastian’s tendency to liken those around him to characters from literature and film emerges from his antisocial tendencies and overreliance on books; his abiding memory of Maria is her dressed as the Duchess de Guermantes from In Search of Lost Time.
Sebastian’s eagerness to meet Maria is compounded by the opportunity to impress upon her the physical transformation wrought upon his body. Through an intense exercise regimen developed by aping fitness vloggers he has achieved an enviable physical condition. He decided such commitment necessary after a health scare involving his heart woke him to the dangers of sedentary disregard of the body. “It was then,” he says, “that I became a person who commits himself to health exercises.” The phrasing here emphasizing becoming a person who does something, versus simply doing it, is not incidental. He is an empty vessel looking for someone to fill him up, a Franz Kappus without a Rilke. He is a modern man, unfulfilled professionally teaching freshman composition and he is lonely. If there is such a thing as a male loneliness epidemic he is one of the afflicted. His exercise is a manifestation of the last instrument available to the powerless: self-discipline. By way of calisthenics, cardio and weight lifting he tells us, “I would so deeply become myself—the real version of myself who I should have been all along, who knew how to live—that I would transform from person (inadequate) to character (good). Though I am an atheist, I can say with certainty that God prefers archetypes to individuals.”
In addition to his new health lifestyle, his other change is nomenclative. He has legally added an accent to his first name, “to prove I had ascended well past the person I once was.” Incidentally, Rilke also changed his first name from Rene to Rainer at the behest of Lou Andreas-Salomé, with whom he was engaged in an affair. In so doing Sebastian now more closely resembles Sebastián, an extremely minor Spanish writer in the vein of Fernando Pessoa to whom Aleister has devoted his career. It is this appellative mirror that draws the older man to the younger originally. Aleister is another model for what Sebastian might become. He has only books and cares to speak of nothing else. He teaches what he wants regardless of the syllabus and has his students over for dinners that function as extended lectures free from the fetters of academic propriety.
Rife throughout the novel are men adrift: young men looking for role models to follow and old men at the end of their charade. The statement that “God prefers archetypes to individuals” is indicative of a character for whom performance is a preferred state, and mere existence a base one to be transcended as quickly as possible. Sebastian’s life is not made up of a sincere pursuit of his interests or an active interrogation into what those might be. It is a curious and empty search for the right suit to wear and the most fitting affect to try out. His undergraduate thesis on Martin Heidegger “was more or less drivel, with a list of secondary sources far below the basic requirements expected for the assignment, and in fact, most of those secondary sources were completely falsified.” No one notices and Sebastian discards the material as soon as it has secured his diploma.
Philosophy in general is degraded in favor of literature: “Even the total failures of literature… are more fake-real than the most sublime work of philosophy, which is always fake-fake.” So says Aleister. Philosophy has pretensions to an investigation of truth and the real, while literature is a show, a story, truth through allusion. It is no wonder that in a life spent aspiring towards archetype-dom the latter would be preferred to the former. Literature is a model of life itself but it is constructed so that a reader can take from it what they will. Aleister tells Sebastian that “if Cervantes was a philosopher, and not a writer of the first great novel, he would not have written Don Quixote but the Don Quixote concept.” Sebastian has rejected philosophy and its didacticism in favor of literature, whose guiding hand is better suited to gently steering him wherever he wants to go. After all it is Virgil, not Seneca, who comes to escort Dante through Hell.
Sebastian’s vow of silence is an expression of his will, the use of which functions as another guiding structure for his life. He annually sets New Year’s resolutions for himself that will “disturb my inner climate for the better.” When attempting to draft a list for the impending year, however, he comes up blank. This ominous failure does not deter him from trying. Later, Aleister sneers that:
Every young man such as yourself has such a mistaken phase. He has such a phase, and he commits himself to little rules and so on. More rules to follow! No eating after seven o’clock. Water first thing in the morning. One hundred push-ups a day. A young man such as yourself has such a mistaken phase and it is a thing to observe. Like watching a dog chase its tail: look at how diligently he applies himself.
If philosophy’s lessons will be disregarded then self-mastery cannot come from without, only from within via iron discipline. But these discrete habits do not a person make. One is left with merely a list, of resolutions aspired to, of actions taken, of pleasures denied.
When Sebastian arrives at the party, his hopes are once again dashed and made to seem foolish. The party is, without giving away the plot, not what he had expected. Aleister is there, a warning to Sebastian. He is a cautionary tale, a Dickensian apparition of New Year’s Eves yet to come. He has spent too much of his life in books and like Don Quixote de la Mancha, he suffers from a madness stimulated by overreading. Sebastian complains to the reader that Aleister has used him in order to force him to listen once more to his lectures and tired old stories. But he acts out his part of Sancho Panza, too, using the older man in turn as a means to get what he wants, that is, a meeting with Maria. Indeed, Sebastian is more like Aleister than he would care to admit. The fact is that the younger man is friendless and unable to function in the social world. On the possibility of two other friends from college attending the party, he hazards their presence is likely since “if I recalled correctly, they were both absolute fucking losers… I liked them, of course, but it was the truth.” Sebastian sees reflections of himself in other people and recoils at the likeness. When he arrives at the professor’s house he marks its disarray and the manner in which it has been overtaken by disorganized piles of books, seemingly unaware he has earlier described his own quarters in nearly identical terms.
The novel, told entirely in the first person in Sebastian’s voice, maintains a calm tone throughout that belies something more manic. The effect is like listening to a smart friend over a drink, laughing at his sly and witty remarks only to find oneself wondering at their content on the walk home later with growing alarm. All of his erudition masks a psyche teetering on a knife’s edge, ready to fall at a gentle breeze. He tells us that “for the majority of my adult life, I’d grown accustomed to wearing the equivalent of a cartoon character’s wardrobe: every day I donned a simple button-down shirt, typically of the Oxford variant, and a pair of light-wash denim jeans. I wore this to work and everywhere else I needed to go that wasn’t work.” This is the same character who pops an amphetamine capsule on a whim before he is due to teach a composition class. The lecture that follows is predictably animated, so much so that he climbs on top of the lectern, loses his balance and comes crashing down to the floor below. This is not a healthy person, no matter how diligently he attends to his exercise or how regularly he lays out his wardrobe.
Sebastian is drifting through life, variously ignoring or holding in contempt those he passes by. He is an extreme example of the alienated modern man. He relates everything to art and literature, his most important relationship is one-sided devotion to a woman on the other side of a screen, and his professional career offers him no satisfaction or sense of purpose. Something in his life has gone awry, though identifying what the culprit might be proves elusive. Most of the characters in the novel are failures if measured by a typical social standard. Aleister publishes infrequently and the subject of his life’s work, the Catalan writer Sebastián Castillo, finds so little purchase among the wider public that Aleister’s grand translation project is cancelled prematurely. Yet measured by their own, strange standards these characters are taking what they can from a world that continues to disappoint their expectations. They have turned inward and desperately worked to redefine life’s terms into something tenable. In doing so they have become lonely hermits scribbling away dutifully at marginalia and forgotten manuscripts. Although Sebastian’s college years are firmly behind him, his narration is saturated with memories of halcyon days spent in the university. It was there that his interest in Maria was sparked, in their final class together covering the Divine Comedy. In the intervening years Sebastian has gotten lost from the straight road and found himself lost in his own dark woods. He has kept the newly-divorced Maria faithfully in his heart as his Beatrice, whether or not she knows to be there to meet him at the end of his journey. But while Dante had Virgil, and Franz Kappus had Rilke, Sebastian has no one to give advice worth following. He is drifting, not towards the mount of joy but deeper into the brambles. When Rilke retreated to Trieste he began what would become the Duino Elegies; Sebastian’s withdrawal offers no similar promise, only silence and the confusion and contempt that are its produce.
Theodore Sovinski
Theodore Sovinski is a writer living in Worthington, Ohio. His work has appeared most recently in Full Stop, Always Crashing, Apocalypse Confidential and Propagule.