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| Property of Snowberry |
A friend of mine had recommended me a book by his father some months ago. His father is a historian and has published several books in Costa Rica, mainly through university publishers like the EUNA and EUNED. His emphasis is primarily on Latin American history, oftentimes with a slight leftish taste to his topics. I came to this recommendation as I was once talking to my friend and the name of Rosa Luxemburg came up. He mentioned his father had written about her and I've got ecstatic about the possibility of laying my hands on it. As it is, his book on Rosa Luxemburg is not available here, but for some reason available only in Chile.
Anyway, we've kept talking and he recommended me this book titled "El poema perdido de Aurora Cáceres" (The lost poem of Aurora Cáceres), saying he was sure I would love it. Trusting as I am, I've searched this book low and high and found it at the International Literature Festival held here in the end of July (or was it August?). It wasn't until recently that I've got to read it - following a month of October packed with other death-centric readings - and... Well, here is where our actual post start.
In my personal experience, Latin American authors that try to cultivate the "true Latin American literature", like to fall back to their own experience and their own lives as sources of inspiration. I find it funny because often these author have ample international experience, and many of them had studying experiences abroad is "posh" places such as wherever in the United States and wherever in Europe. Yet, as they come back, they seek to detach their work from what may have amazed them over there, by sticking strickly to their Latin American prism. I can't precise it where, but I do have a hazy memory of someone saying that true literature could only come from the personal experience of the author. Now, clearly I disagree with that. Mystery writers don't write from experience (at least I hope), and sci-fi and fantasy are clear examples of the heights imagination can reach, completely detached from experience. However the experience-centered literature was a thing and is a thing in some circles.
Aside from the "write from what you know" idea, the language and the wordsmithship of many Latin American authors favor a certain crudity in their expression. Sensations and facts and happenings are literally vomited over the pages in raw, unprepared, brutal ways.
As I started reading this book, I was quickly confronted with this vein of the literature, then it was rather quickly sinking deeper and deeper into a pit of dispair and misogyny. Page after page the story revealed a self absorbed man, desperate to escape, though there is never a clear thing or person or idea from which he tries to distance himself. Responsability, maybe? As the character delved into a dizzying world of sexual chaos, his thoughts about his family and his children were sprayed carelessly around like a second thought, or the remnants of puke dripping from the soiled cuff of the shirt. Though the crude sexual language and the demeaning phrases and pictures conjured by the author, the fleeting mentions of the family - dismissing the wife and the kids and centering only of the lost son, the dead one, and mainly on his death, not even his life - were disturbing.
I consider myself a regular reader, with not many qualms about what I can stomach when reading, and certainly I'm resistant in reading material of sexual nature, but this book became hard to swallow for me. It was not only the crudity of the language, but I was now seeing my friend through the eyes of his father, my friend's family through the eyes of a man who couldn't care less about about them, for whom they were a fixture or an excuse in the best of cases to justify his unsatiable need to run away from everything and purposefully seek out and choose the worse possible options in life. I held the book and my eyes trembled thinking of my friend reading those words. I was holding in my hands a sticky door to private, sickening family drama. How could he read that? Had he really read it or did he just recommend it based on the blurb?
The blurb does say it is a book about books and what people does for book, but the books in this story are nothing other than a poor excuse to shamelessly display a story written with a penis.
In some parts the author displays a heavy influence by Henry Miller - quite a taste of hos Tropic of Cancer - where the treatment of women is demeaning and visceral. As Miller, this author also vilifies the women in the story, making them all into dick-hungry, devious, stupid whores that try to hold up some sort of moral of intellectual standard that crumbles down in the end by their interaction with men.
As the story flows and the spirit of the author skinwalks from character to character, letting go of the family to simply concentrate on the women that play with them, sparsed with stories of lost poems, rare books and whatnots, and some careless homophobic slur passed as "male Latin American culture", it becomes easier to detach from the second hand pain my friend could have experienced, and see the author to the eyes as someone that has nothing to do with me. Through his skinwalking, as he sheds his visible social accesories, things start to emerge. For once, he does subscribe to the Latin American troubadour movement, but wraps it up in fashionable dispair. His once leftish inclination mutates into a bourgeois lifestyle, where flippant and fashionably acid comments cover up for the fact that he has, indeed, abandoned the red ranks. He sheds family and ideology, and instead rises the dregs of a disorderly life where everything is seen with hatred and crudity.
A picture emerges of a disorderly life where luxury and an accumulation of trips and trinkets out of the hands of the middle class of the seventies are coveted to be displayed in a purposefully disdainful manner in order to cover and justify for a dirty, disrespectful sexual pursuit of women (better if you can snatch a couple of sexual encounters from under her man, and give her back well used). Destinations stop being flashy, and listings of all the books and authors and... yeah, the eye jumps to the end of the comma string (which sadly you can't do when talking to someone), you are faced with a man who sees life as an unhappy, unsatisfying cesspool where his whole existence, his whole richness and all he possesses swirls around the stench and waste. A man who swells his lungs with putrid air and relishes in the fetid broth he has created around himself.
I asked my friend if he had read the book. He had. But had he really-really read it? Yes, he had.
"Why? Didn't you like it?"
"I... rather not tell you..."
"You didn't like it?"
"It's... disturbing."
"You didn't like it then."
"I can't forget this is your dad, and you read this. I find it disturbing from that perspective. I find it hurtful."
He dropped the topic.
