“Con Toda Palabra” (With All Words) by Lhasa de Sela. The Living Road 2003.
The world will have to enter the next decade without the rough-edged voice and haunting lyrics of Lhasa de Sela, who passed away just hours before midnight on New Year’s Eve.
Lhasa, an internationally known singer and songwriter, was able to write deeply evocative, emotional lyrics equally in English, Spanish and French. This unusual pedigree stems from a childhood spent both in the US and in Mexico, which eventually gave way to an adulthood based in Montreal. However, her dark, lush music sounds like none of these places specifically, instead tracing its roots to some mysterious, secretive land in between. Switching from one language to another lends a spice and vibrancy that is matched by the power of her distinctive, often anguished, voice.
The video above illustrates the first track from her 2003 album, The Living Road, which garnered Lhasa the award for Best Artist of the Americas from the BBC 3 World Music Awards. Though fighting breast cancer for almost two years, Lhasa managed to record a final album—Lhasa—which dropped less than a month ago.
WITH ALL WORDS
WITH ALL SMILES WITH ALL LOOKS
WITH ALL CARESSES
I DRAW NEAR THE WATER DRINKING YOUR KISS THE LIGHT OF YOUR FACE
THE LIGHT OF YOUR BODY
TO LOVE YOU IS A PRAYER THE SONG OF THE MUTE THE EYES OF THE BLIND THE NAKED SECRET
I ENTRUST MYSELF TO YOUR ARMS I'm AFRAID AND I'M CALM A PRAYER IN MY MOUTH AND A PRAYER IN MY SOUL
The author of my very favorite book has passed away. I was so fervently hoping for something new before he passed, but I’ll be content to re-read his masterpiece “The Dictionary of the Khazars” again and again. And it’s easy to re-read his work, considering how he built his novels:
“An academic whose field, perhaps unsurprisingly, was philosophy, Mr. Pavic taught for many years at the University of Belgrade. Dreamlike, playful and formally unorthodox, his novels were like hardbound hypertext in their insistence on offering readers alternate, nonlinear ways of navigating a story.
Mr. Pavic’s narratives do away with the forced-march, page-after-page strategy to which most readers are accustomed. They are profuse with self-reference, unreliable narration, authorial asides and “Rashomon”-like shifts in point of view. Stories nest within stories like the pieces of a Russian doll.
Mr. Pavic’s next novel, “Landscape Painted With Tea” (Knopf, 1990; translated by Ms. Pribicevic-Zoric), is partly organized as a crossword puzzle, with alternating sections titled “Across” and “Down.” Readers may approach the book chronologically by reading only the “Across” sections, or less chronologically and with more digressions by reading the “Down” sections. Either strategy gradually reveals the story of a soul-searching architect who roams a labyrinth of meditation and memory.”
Yes, books built like lexicons with interlocking entries, books to be “solved” like crossword puzzles, even books based on tarot cards to be interpreted in different patterns. Even though he has passed on, he has left a mysterious, beautiful literary legacy for us to untangle and solve as many times as we wish.
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Posted by various vapor, assembled. on Mon Jan 4th at 8:49PM