the alienist (machado de assis, tr william l grossman)

Machado de Assis’ slender tome is an effortless masterpieces that feels as though it was written in a day, to be read in an hour. It tells the simple story of the apparently cultured man of science, Simão Bacamarte, who sets up an asylum to study madness in a small Brazilian town. The scientist gradually starts locking up anyone he deems insane, including his wife, bringing about a revolution. However, the revolutionaries also believe in science, and as a result they don’t lock Bacamarte up, or even release his prisoners. Finally, Bacamarte reaches the reasonably logical conclusion that in a mad world, the sane are the truly crazy people, and starts locking people up on that basis. Neither rationality nor irrationality can be trusted. Bacamarte is a brilliant charlatan so convinced of his own genius that he has succeeded in convincing everyone else. If ever you wanted an allegory for what is occurring in present day Brazil, this could scarcely be bettered: Bolsonaro’s Brazil seems to be caught up in the spectacle of re-enacting de Assis’ thesis. In addition it goes to the heart of the issues surrounding notions of scientific rationality as a basis for claiming rights over what might be deemed sanity; an issue which is hot-wired into the Brazilian psyche. As perfect a short novel as you could hope to find, one that reveals that alternative literary strands were alive in kicking in Latin America long before the arrival of Marquez, Borges et al. 

the adventures of china iron (gabriela cabezón cámara tr fiona mackintosh and iona macintyre)

Cabezón Cámara’s novel has been nominated for the international Booker prize and you can sort of see why. It’s something of a romp with its bawdy portrayal of the titular heroine as she crosses the Pampas in the year of our lord 1872. China is the estranged wife of Martin Fierro, (Fierro meaning “iron” in spanish), the subject of the great national epic poem by José Hernández, who appears in the novel as a dissolute army captain running a fort in the wilderness. Fierro also pops up as do other characters from the poem. However, this is a feminist riff on the macho history of the evolving Argentina. China hooks up with an Englishwoman, Liz, looking to reach her husband who has inherited land in the Indian territories. China and Liz roll across the Pampas in their wagon, until they reach the fort. They have a few adventures and a great deal of vigorous sex, with Liz proving to be the model of the repressed Englishwoman who lets it all hang out as she goes native. After their sojourn in the fort, they flee into the Indian territory where they live a kind of Pantheistic idyll. It’s all quite charming and frothy, with some purple passages of beauty as the author describes the landscape they’re headed into, and their eventual assimilation into a (very free-love, hippy), native tribe.

el alma de gardel (levrero)

There’s something more awkward about commenting on the work of someone from your own country. The closer they are, the more you expect, perhaps. Many people I know love Levrero’s work dearly. He has been recommended to me many a time. I read a short collection of pieces he wrote over a year for the newspaper, and enjoyed it, but found it slightly underwhelming. The same could be said for this curious short novel, about a man who believes he has been visited by Gardel’s ghost. The man is a writer, who likes the rain and spends a lot of time in the National Library. He has an undeniably lecherous attitude to women, talking at length about how he likes finding himself in close confines with them on the bus. At which point you’re not quite sure as a reader how to place this character. Is he, as he initially seems, the writer’s alter-ego, or is he some slightly seedy older man? Perhaps the latter, but in that case, to what end? Why would a reader want to engage with him? And what does Gardel have to do with any of this? These were some of the questions that arose from reading the novel and I have to be honest and say they felt like slightly frustrating questions. Perhaps I chose the wrong novel, as I believe there are many, or perhaps, as a fellow Uruguayan, I am inclined to be overly critical. 

1491 (charles c mann)

1491 is a book that ought to change the way that history is taught forever. It won’t, because the narrative it is confronting, that of European civilisation triumphing over the indigenous peoples of the americas, is so engrained that it will perhaps, never change. The book might have been sub-headed the decline and fall of the pre-Colombian empires. The multiple empires that grew, thrived, tamed the land, and then faded away, or in the case of those which were still extant upon the arrival of the Europeans, were decimated by plague and war. Mann’s theory is clear: the major factor in the European conquest of the Americas was biological. Only today, perhaps, for the first time in three generations, can we start to understand that germs are far more powerful than steel or gunpowder. However, 1491 is about far more than just the imminent pre-Colombian era. He is also exacting on the scale of both population and urban development of the americas before the arrival of the Europeans, a scale that history, written by the ‘victors’ has failed to either recognise or understand. The book exudes a range of scholarship that is impressive, going into archaeological, ethnological, seismological detail about the history of both continents, North and South, disarming the division that is so frequently drawn between them. It’s hard to say quite how impressive this book is, both in terms of its articulation and defence of its own thesis, and in terms of the radical implications of that thesis for our interpretation of the course of human history, no less.