irse yendo (leonor courtoisie)

Leonor Courtoisie’s novel a clef is part memoir, part novel. One might attribute the influence of Sergio Blanco and the whole school of auto-ficción, but this form of writing, the novel as journal, has been around forever. Hamsun, Rilke, Rousseau, to name just a few that my ignorance permits.

The style of the novel is wilfully anti-narrative. It threads together impressions and memories from the writer’s time watching her barrio transformed by development, a process that she is sure will soon claim her old family home and the memories contained within it. As such the novel is a homage to the dysfunctional family, a strident thematic in Uruguayan culture and one that links her with the subject matter of the play she quits, directed by a celebrated local director whose methods are put under the microscope.

There’s a certain courage to this latter strand, a readiness to take on the sacred cows of the writer’s culture in a self-enclosed society where honesty is not always the wisest policy. Irse Yendo floats between these poles of family, theatre and development, teasing out connections, flirting with self-indulgence, seeking to both provoke and retreat at the same time.

There’s something downbeat at play, which is reflective of the condition of inhabiting a city where the ceiling is always going to be low, and the head is bound to hurt when its aspirations bump up against that ceiling. Just as there is no way to stop the barrio being gradually submitted to the will of the developers, who tear down history to replace it with uniform blocks of flats, the challenge is to find a way to retain a sense of wonder and hope, in spite of everything that provokes the opposite emotions. As such Courtoisie’s novel captures almost too acutely the ennui of growing into your twenties on the edges of the western world. 

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NB. As an immigrant citizen of this city, the novel’s insularity left me feeling uneasy. In a more cosmopolitan city, the presence of local social codes is far easier to negotiate. One is but one of many hundreds of thousands who are seeking to learn how to belong, how to adapt to this geography, with its architecture of place and memory. In a city where the immigrant is a stranger beast, the reminders that one comes from over yonder are perhaps more pressing. Irse Yendo is a book that describes a society that is slowly being hollowed out, but in capturing that society, the writer also helped to locate how distant the contemporary immigrant’s existence will always be from truly belonging to this world, even as this world itself is being lost.