The Insufferable Gaucho

Author:  Roberto Bolaño

Title: The Insufferable Gaucho

Publisher House: New Directions Book

By David D. Medina

           

Roberto Bolaño says that he read immoderately, but that he never wanted to be a successful author. For a writer who didn’t seek popularity, Bolaño is gaining a wider readership after his death as more of his books are being translated into English and studied in universities across the world.

The Insufferable Gaucho, a collection of five stories and two essays, is a perfect example of why Bolaño has become a literary favorite. In these finely crafted pieces, Bolaño shows his mastery of fiction and nonfiction by using his immense imagination to create worlds that are enthralling and magical. Jumping rabbits that bite, a rat police officer who seeks a serial killer, and a killer who is mistaken for a saint, are the type of characters that populate these brilliant stories.

The title story, “The Insufferable Gaucho,” is a tribute to Jorge Luis Borges, whom Bolaño deeply admired as one of the literary masters of Latin America. Bolaño takes Borges’ story, “The South,” and adds a humorous twist to it. In Borges’ story, a man goes to the south of Argentina and encounters his death at the hands of vicious gauchos. In Bolaño’s work, a judge, who is upset with the economic downturn of his country, travels south to seek the strength of his nation only to find wimpy gauchos who hunt rabbits instead of herding cows.

“Police Rat” may sound like a juvenile story, but it only takes a page to pull you into the underground world of rodents and the mysterious murders that Pepe the rat cop must solve. As he patrols the sewers, Pepe begins to discover rats killed by someone other than predators, such as snakes and blind alligators. His suspicion that a rat may be the serial killer gets him into trouble with his commissioner, who tells him that rats do no kill other rats. The story ends with a moving revelation that if members of the same species kill each other, then we are all doomed to disappear.

“Two Catholic Tales” is a gem of ingenuity. As one tale finishes, the other begins and both merge at the end of the second tale. The former tale is about a teenager with a torturous soul who is waiting for a sign from heaven to decide if he should pursue the life of a saint. The latter is about a mentally disturbed man who murders a monk, puts on his robe, and trudges through the snow barefooted because his shoes have blood on them. The teenager from the first tale sees the killer and thinks he is a true monk—the sign he has been waiting for.

In the essay “Myths of Cthulhu,” Bolaño rails against today’s writers for seeking respectability. “Writers today…are no longer young men of means unafraid to inveigh against the norms of respectable society, much less a bunch of misfits, but products of the middle and working classes determined to scale the Everest of respectability, hungry for respectability,” he writes.

Bolaño never sought respectability, but when you are as talented as he was, you don’t have to do much to promote yourself. The writing speaks for itself.

 

A Peculiar Novel

By David D. Medina

Author: Horacio Castellanos Moya,

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Title: The She-Devil in the Mirror

Publisher: New Directions, NY, 2009.

            The She-Devil in the Mirror is a peculiar novel: it’s a murder mystery with a social conscience. Mixing entertainment with serious social issues is difficult to do well in art, but Horacio Castellanos Moya manages to create a story that is suspenseful while exposing injustice, hypocrisy, racism, class differences and corruption in a Central American country that is recovering from a civil war.

            Told through the voice of an upper-class, neurotic woman, the story unfolds in San Salvador, where the narrator’s best friend, Olga Maria, has been killed by a hit man. Why would anyone want to murder a “respectable” woman who apparently didn’t have any enemies? That’s what the narrator, Laura Rivera, sets out to find.

            Laura has a perceptive eye and an opinionated tongue. As each of the characters appears, she provides profiles that are peppered with cutting remarks. She doesn’t like dark-skinned people, poor people, priests (especially the left-leaning kind), and boring men, such as her husband, whom she divorced. 

            Though Laura tries to paint Olga Maria as a devoted wife, she tells us that Olga had a series of secret lovers who may have benefitted from her death. There’s Jose Carlos, a photographer who had to leave El Salvador because he was involved with the Communists during the country’s civil war. On his return, he falls in love with Olga and takes pictures of her in the nude.  There’s Yuca, a wealthy businessman who is making a move to run for president of El Salvador. Addicted to cocaine, he can’t get an erection. And much to Laura’s surprise, her husband, Alberto, also had an affair with Olga.  Educated in the United States, Alberto is a financial wizard whose investment company in San Salvador has tanked, affecting many of the landowners who are rebounding from the effects of a war that sought to redistribute wealth.

As rumors and speculations abound about the motive, Laura becomes frantic and fearful for her own life. She can’t trust the police because she fears that they are working with the government to cover up the murder. She fears that rich business people with ties to the Cali Cartel might want her dead because she is being too nosy.

             Early in the book, Laura states, “In this place everyone knows everything about everybody.” That may be true at the superficial level of a close society, but when it comes to murder, information and the truth become more elusive.

            At the end of the book, Laura claims: “With Olga’s murder the same thing will happen that happens with all the crimes committed in this country: the authorities will never find out anything and people will simply forget about it.”

            Horacio Castellano Moya does an admirable job in creating a narrator who is unbearable at first with her arrogance and catty remarks, but evolves into a humane person as the case wears her down and her neurosis spirals out of control, talking faster and faster to who knows whom.