Friday, March 28, 2008

Argentina as Faust

Virginia Guevara, one of Las viudas de los jueves’ two main narrators, arrives with her family at Altos de la Cascada after having got a real bargain (un negocio redondo) on a house whose owner, Antieri, a reclusive military man whose name curiously resembles Galtieri, Argentina’s de facto president during the country’s murderous last military dictatorship, committed suicide. Profiting from tragedy is a recurrent theme: not only does the enthusiasm with which Virginia negociate the transaction lead her to a thriving real-estate career built on the financial woes, job losses and marital breakdowns of her clients, but the insistence of one of her neighbours, that one should take advantage of the incredibly cheap New York hotel deals following 9/11, reminds us of our own self-interested motives—who didn’t think of popping down to post-crisis Argentina for a holiday, when the cost of living plummeted and bargains were to be had aplenty to holders of strong currencies? Hay que aprovechar. The novel opens with a fictional suicide that not only resonates with the recent past, but also forshadows the collective suicide of its dénouement, itself analogous to the near destruction of a once prosperous country having sought immediate happiness through a Faustian bargain with the US dollar and having paid a heavy price. When visiting Antieri’s house for the first time, Virginia finds empty bookcovers of Goethe’s masterpiece, which suggests a willed ignorance of the consequences of commerce with the devil, or, in Argentina’s case, with the International Monetary Fund.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

The personal and the political

The personal and the political coincide in Agosto y fuga, a novel in which a group of citizens in Mexico’s capital find their intimate lives intertwined with the political events of the day, namely the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas and the Mexican elections of August, 1994. Though the ‘intense solitude’ of these educated, cosmopolitan characters is convincing, the connection between it and the larger national drama in which this solitude unfolds—the formal axis on which this novel is based--is less so. Unlike Las viudas de los jueves, in which the personal and political are structurally integrated in such a way that the events leading to Argentina’s 2001 economic collapse inform both the novel’s form and the psychological makeup of its characters, I often had the impression that the dramatic historical events of August 1994 were tacked on to an otherwise very engaging novel about relationships. Villegas’ novel requires a seamless integration of micro and macrocosm to succeed, but instead provides a succession of disjunctive registers in which the existential and romantic collide against the political—the latter being replete with acronyms potentially confusing to the Mexican reader. Agosto y fuga is good but only have so.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

laberintos de perplejidad

I read Órbitas. Tertulias like a rendez-vous manqué, a desencuentro in which, alas, estabamos condenados a no coincidir. Grasping it is similar to the author’s attempt at grasping his dream: se mueve casi sin límites por el mapa…de tan nítido el sueño se ha vuelto borroso. Am I dozing off out of genuine fatigue, or is Orbitás itself the somnífero? As is often the case when reading blurry phrases—Pero me gusta el dark. Super Dark. Recontramosfostrofólico—I’m never sure whether their impenetrability is a formal characteristic of the work, or whether it owes more to my limited access to the Spanish language. In the case of Mirko Lauer, it is probably both. Reading the experimental cut-ups of a writer like William Burroughs (whom Lauer apparently frequented and with whom he seems to share a fondness for peyote) is work enough in English. But reading his Hispanic imitators, or in this case Czecho-Hispanic, is work and then some. ¿Enjoyadísimo? Hardly. Quite frankly, I’d rather be watching Burroughs eat lunch naked; or, like participants in a nautical tertulia, be drinking vulgar but honest wine; or be buying second-hand clothing in London; or even be reading Dé Hache Lawrence.
What is uncomfortable about this is that it subverts any confidence I might have in making a plausible aesthetic judgment—No te entiendo Mirko—, making it tempting to fall back on the prestige generated by the cultural economy—¿Primado en París? It must be good—to make it for me. But that would be too easy. I’m as susceptible to the aura of Parisian cultural mandarinism as the next guy, but not a slave to it. So I will only risk a question: Could Oribitas. Tertulias be surfing the same waves as Lauer's poetry, those cargada[s] de dioses varios que va[n] llevando [al autor] hasta [su] propria parodia?