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.

A Classic: Seven Nights

 

By Jorge Luis Borges

A New Directions Book

New York 2009


Review by David D. Medina
 

 Literature is a form of happiness for Jorge Luis Borges. If we are sensitive, he tells us,  “Beauty awaits us in ambush.”  In Seven Nights, a collection of seven lectures in the form of essays that were first published in 1980 in Spanish and now translated into English, beauty awaits us on almost every page.

As readers of Borges know, the Argentine writer is a master of sparse prose. With simple, concise sentences, he delves deeply into an array of topics, jumping from one idea to another, overwhelming us with pleasure.

In Seven Nights, Borges expounds on the subjects of The Divine Comedy, nightmares, The Thousand and One Nights, Buddhism, poetry, the Kabbalah, and blindness.  The themes that he writes about in these essays appear in many of his short stories: transmigration of the soul, predestination, the repetition of history, the horror of labyrinths and mirrors.

Borges was a prolific writer and a voracious reader.  As director of the national library of Argentina, he had access to almost any book in the world. “I am hedonistic reader,” he says in The Divine Comedy essay.  “I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me.” To him, The Divine Comedy was the best book ever written in literature. “The Commedia is a book that everyone ought to read. Not to do so is to deprive oneself of the greatest gift that literature can give us; it is to submit to a strange asceticism.”

Another book that had a profound influence on Borges is The Thousand and One Nights. Many of the ideas and structures of his short stories emulate the fiction of this ancient book that he so dearly loved. “One feels like getting lost in The Thousand and One Nights. One knows that entering that book one can forget one’s own poor human fate, one can enter a world, a world made of archetypal figures but also of individuals.”

In the essay “Poetry,” Borges gives us a glimpse of his philosophy of writing. He believes that everything existed in a previous time and it’s the writer’s duty to discover or to remember the beauty that was lost. “When I write something, I have the sensation that it existed before.  I know more or less the beginning and the end, and then I discover the intervening parts. But I do not have the sensation of having invented them, that they depend on my free will.”

Perhaps, his most moving essay is “Blindness,” in which he talks about his “modest” blindness because it was total in one eye and partial in the other. He did not view his handicap as a misfortune but rather as another style of life, and he goes on to talk about how other great writers—Joyce, Milton, Homer—created masterpieces in spite of their blindness.

When bad things happen to artists, they should use misfortune as a source of inspiration, Borges believes. “Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art.  . . . Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstance of our lives things that are eternal or aspire to be so.”

Thanks in part to his blindness, Borges has given us a body of work that will go beyond our lives and will provide us with happiness and beauty. These seven essays are indispensable for anyone who wants to maneuver through the labyrinthine world of Borges.