el inglés (martin bentancor)

There’s a school of literature in the Americas which might be described as stoic rural. Willa Cather, Jack London, Faulkner, Quiroga,  Juan Rulfo, Twain, even Marquez, perhaps. Of course there are variations on the school, but essentially these are novels about those who made a home for themselves on the edges of the new world, imbuing these new territories with mythical figures, slightly larger than life, gods of the new frontiers. El Inglés belongs to this category. Set over the course of a wake taking place over the course of a single night, as a mysterious friend of the deceased narrates a story to a handful of men about el Inglés, an Englishman called Collingwood who settled in an Uruguayan backwater. It’s a tale which is bigger on detail than it is on action, although it neatly succeeds in rounding up the story of the Englishman and the deceased into the same bundle, seen through the eyes of the schoolmaster, who is himself a stranger to these parts. Where Bentanor comes up trumps is in the way he succeeds in evoking the idea of a timeless world, unchanged and unchangeable. Furthermore, by framing the story against the backdrop of a single night, he captures the languorous rhythms of this rural backwater, where present, past and future seem to eddy in the same waters, washing up against each other in an inseparable dance.