Juan José Saer passed away in 2005, in Paris. During his
final days in the hospital he worked on the book “La Grande” which was
published posthumously in October of the same year. In Amanda Hopkinson’s obituary published in
The Guardian, she says:
Born outside the
literary nexus of the capital, to parents of siriolibanes (Middle Eastern)
origin, his writing had nothing to do with the world of tango and extravagant
baroque, nor with the streets of Buenos Aires and Latin American magical
realism.
Instead he wrote, in a
strikingly spare style, of what he knew personally. He wrote of his home town,
the provincial city of Santa Fe and its cast of often strange characters, and
of his adopted home, Paris, a place of tower blocks and back alleys, inhabited
by incomers and sadistic criminals, and by his fictitious maverick, Chief
Inspector Morvan.
With a dozen novels, four volumes of short stories and a
collection of poetry he was a celebrated part of the Argentine literary scene,
even though he lived “in exile” in France. This last work, published by Open
Letter Books, apparently contains numerous characters from earlier works, and
was shortlisted for the US based Best Translated Book Award for 2015.
Our story opens with two men crossing a field, Gutiérrez,
who mysteriously disappeared from Argentina thirty years before and who has
just as mysteriously reappeared, buying a mansion. He is accompanied by a
“friend” (they’ve met only twice before this day), Nula, a young wine salesman.
Our novel takes place over the space of a single week, split
into seven sections, commencing with “Tuesday Water Sounds”, however it also
takes place over thirty years, as our multi layered number of characters
interact, question Gutiérrez’s disappearance and reflect on the literary movement
“precisionism”.
Running at close to 500 pages
there is plenty of room for our novelist to muse on a raft of themes, including
the inner machinations of his main protagonists:
They – people from the rich
countries he lived in for more than thirty years – have completely lost touch
with reality and now slither around in a miserable sensualism and, as a moral
consequence, content themselves with the sporadic exercise of beneficence and
the contrite formulation of instructive aphorisms. He refers to the rich as the
fifth column and the foreign party, and the rest, the masses, he argues, would
be willing to trade tin their twelve-year-old daughter to a Turkish brothel for
a new car. Any government lie suits them fine as long as they don’t have to
give up their credit cards or do without superfluous possessions. The rich
purchase their solutions to everything, as do the poor, but with debt. They are
obsessed with convincing themselves that their way of life is the only rational
one and, consequently, they are continuously indignant at the individual or
collective crimes they commit or tolerate, looking to justify with pedantic
shyster sophisms the acts of cowardice that obligate them to shamelessly defend
the prison of excessive comfort they’ve built for themselves, and so on, and so
on.
This is a very detailed work, although only over the course
of a single week it contains musings on a raft of subjects, sometimes taking
numerous pages to describe the natural environment and the surroundings in
minute detail. For example, the effect of multiple raindrops on a river simply
being single raindrops.
Our character development is of course detailed (Wednesday
The Four Corners – section two) includes Nula’s family history, beginning with
his grandfather who arrived in this Argentine village from Damascus. We also
learn of Nula’s relationship with Lucía (as it transpires Gutiérrez’s
illegitimate daughter) and their meeting. A coincidence, with long ruminations
of space and time, chemical reactions that made “life” possible, to Nula’s
delay at a cafe, to Lucía simply walking past at the time Nula leaves the cafe.
The fragments of each chanracter’s make-up, builds to a
crescendo on the make up of relationships, you read wondering if all these
pieces of the puzzle explain why Gutiérrez disappeared thirty years ago. As
each day unfolds you know it is building to the invitations being handed out by
Gutiérrez to a gathering at his mansion on the Sunday.
With a recurring motif of “ANOTHER MORO PROPERTY FOR SALE”
and a mobile sign with the slogan “Visit HELVECIA, FOR THE GOLDEN DORADO” the
puzzle has many layers. However the main theme is the passing of time
(obviously within the seven day setting on the thirty year absence).
The sun has now begun to redden;
its circumference is sharper and the flaming disc seems to have cooled and
smoothed, losing its look of boiling metal and gaining a sort of gentleness.
But the afternoon that is repeated on the plain has something solemn and
disquieting about it, and an unmistakable impression comes suddenly and
destroys every illusion, that the place we thought we were living is another,
larger, and this destructive realization removes every known sense of the verb to live.
What happened whilst Gutiérrez was away? Returning “with the
same economy of explanations as when he left”. What actually is the literary
movement “precisionism” all about? For example, we have three pages explaining
Gabriela threading a needle with cotton, is this precisionism?
A number of times I couldn’t help but recall Roberto Bolaño’s
“The Savage Detectives” with multiple characters, a missing “artist” a literary
movement and of course the South American feel. But in my mind this is no Bolaño.
To be honest this work made me feel like I was wading chest
deep through a swamp of thick immutable treacle, the length and depth of
passages that have no relevance (page after page to thread a needle?) and the
banality of existence came to the fore. I can fully understand why Juan José
Saer has a following, and I can fully appreciate the depth and breadth of his
prose, it is just not my style. A work I wouldn’t have placed on the Best Translated
Book Award shortlist, with a number higher raked in my opinion than this one.
No comments:
Post a Comment