A Reading Peppered with Revelations

Posted on 2014/06/06 by diálogos

Apocalipsis con Amazonas
Author: Jorge Etcheverry
Publisher: Antares
Toronto, 2014
Review by Marcelo Novoa

“In contrast with the Anglo-American school, Latin American fantastic literature does not constitute a clearly defined movement: it is mixed inextricably with general literature, free of stifling cultural histories, and at the same time shaped by the multiple breeding grounds of the countries that produce it, demonstrating a remarkable vitality and originality, much greater than that which prevails in the attempts at genres such as science fiction or crime fiction in the same geographic region.” – Elvio Gandolfo, Antología de Literatura Fantástica Latinoamericana (1971)

“He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I. In the present one, which a favorable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost.” – Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1957)
1
The new fantastic literature of Latin America has a lot of work to do to differentiate itself from the European fantastic genre of old. Todorov, Vax and Campra repeat again and again their theoretical mantra, that the fantastic will always seek to provoke an emotional impression in the reader, whether by wavering between the possible human and supernatural explanations for the events narrated, or by the contradistinction of laws of the world that is familiar and/or known to us with unknown laws through events that appear supernatural, strange or magic.
With this mantra, these theorists of the centre fail to recognize the virtues of the periphery, exemplified by Borges, García Márquez or Cortázar, to mention only the most notably prolific fantastic authors of this group overexposed by the Hispanic transnationals, and therefore fail to identify the dizzying fractal of boundaries and demarcations where the reality-real opens up onto the vast undiscovered territories that these pioneers bequeathed to us.
And the new generations, as their predecessors well understood, would have to map these realms –which might now be called the space-time continuum or psycho-social coordinates– all over again. These new explorers of the strange and the impossible are playing in penalty time on a field with no lines , weaving through the implausible and the fictitious without losing contact with the ball in their effort to articulate what I tentatively define here as “the new fantastic”.
And here there are names familiar to some of you, which soon will have to be known by heart, such as Mario Bellatín (Peru), Rodrigo Fresán (Argentina), Edmundo Paz Soldán (Bolivia), Jorge Volpi (Mexico) or Roberto Bolaño (Chile), to whom I add here the Chilean poet based in Canada, Jorge Etcheverry, who, like a doorkeeper of two worlds, or rather, a two-headed griffin, given the difference in his age (a little older than those mentioned above) but not in his accurate reflection of our times (with the same themes and discourses), moves like a fish in water around dreamlike tales, strange anecdotes and grotesque characters, and through the usual fin-de-siècle topics, dystopias and mutations included, explored by the fifty odd stories included here, in this shimmering and shadowy compendium that he himself has titled: Apocalipsis con Amazonas (“Apocalypse with Amazons”).
2
The stories contained in this collection explore a wide variety of themes and styles that produce an ever-changing iridescence that is almost dizzying. But if we pause to delve into their internal resonances, their veiled meanings and their intimate pulses, we can identify some coordinates that will help us understand this motley assortment that reveals to us the emperor’s new clothes, although, it must be said, only for clever readers who know how to read between the lines. In this respect, for their diction and construction of world-metaphors, an irresistible poetic spirit is instantly recognizable in certain short tales such as “Un baño”, “El retrato de Dios”, “Retorno con sueño, súcubos, cielo y risas de niñas jóvenes”, “Universo de espejos” and “El saltimbanqui”, among many others scattered through the collection; veritable snapshots with a feverish sensitivity that burn the retina permanently with their beauty and depth.
At the same time, humour and satire can also be found, in stories such as “Rapto por extraterrestres”, “Miniapocalipsis con playa”, “Partenogénesis poética”, “Huidobro literal”, “El secreto de Pedro Armendáriz”, “Acabo de mundo” and “Sin noticias de Despeloteria”. In all these cases, the freshest of fantastic literature draws out our laughter with gentle and fierce, poetic and evocative stories that act as an incessant challenge to our established conception of reality, that blindness that we call common sense, revealing to us the tensions and harmonies between author and his extra-literary world, which – what a surprise! – are identical to the ones that plague us, his busy readers.
On the other hand, animalization –in both its terrestrial and its extraterrestrial versions– is a masterly strategy in the hands of this author, used to signal secret aspects of our veiled fin-de-siècleidentity, so rational as to verge on the bestial, as can be found in “Mujeres extraterrestres en un café”, “Murmullo”, “Las ratas en Ciudad de México”, “El horror austral” or “Testimonio ocular”, which playfully pierce the boundaries between genres like horror and science fiction in search of a new unstable centre of balance, as masterfully resolved in the evocative and heartrending story “La trampa”.
Finally, as a kind of personal coda, I would like to draw attention to three stories that for me reflect the unquestionable value of Jorge Etcheverry’s work and of the real contribution it makes to contemporary fantastic literature. The first of these is the almost perfect work of camera noir, “Tarde en la playa”, worthy of inclusion in any anthology of crime mysteries, in which, beneath the interwoven violence, desire and crime typical of the genre, there persists an apparent indifference on the part of the narrator, who reveals his psychopathic nature just as so often happens today with many an exemplary neighbour.
Another is “Metamorfosis II”, which recreates the Kafkaesque cliche only to turn it upside down with an unexpected twist. And it is this sensitive and desperate diatribe against the exasperating literary powers launched by this “insect with airs of misunderstood genius”, that finally reveals to us an honest, courageous and consistent author, capable of staring straight into the face of his ghosts, horrors and nightmares, which, although veiled, are omnipresent.
And it is with “La solución definitiva” that all our doubts are dispelled. Here, the obscure and irrelevant narrator-witness who recounts to us the freefall of a pathetic artist named Raymond, on a downward spiral that will take him from failure to madness, and whose sins, contradictorily, will be what redeem him from our pity. All the stories are corroded by an acid gaze over the “spirit of the times”, as the author knows he is located at the same historical-material coordinates that imprison his characters (exile, the 60s, environmentalism), introducing into this classic variant of the fantastic genre (secret sects, hidden truths, conspiracies) the real events that have tormented his whole generation, who today struggle between disappearing into the shadows of amnesia or transforming into shining ghosts of a new movement. The whole collection transmits a tense existential discharge, whose truthfulness leaves us with a bitter aftertaste.
I invite readers to explore this book now for themselves, to get lost and found again in other themes, characters and settings as abnormal and fascinating as those mentioned above, which will surely give them more than one surprise or shiver.
3
My random or scattered reading of the stories of the collection Apocalipsis con Amazonas briefly commented on here has left me with a sensation of restlessness and a shudder of abnormality in each case, but in the process has offered me a furiously contemporary picture of our brutally fractured fin-de-siècleworld, where nothing is what it seems, and our intentions, more often than not banal and egotistical, only serve to reveal a web of machinations and absurdities that could make our worst nightmares seem innocuous. Because nothing so resembles the appalling reality than the hell in which we have chosen to live until our end.
And Jorge Etcheverry intuits this in the stories contained here, many of them remarkable, absorbing, and always marked by verbal wit. Because he valiantly warns us, with a twisted smile, as is the responsibility of every Latin American veteran of a thousand wars, that nobody gets out of here except on wings of imagination and insanity, which in strict poetic terms might well be the role of these stories told here.
Translated by Martin Boyd
Marcelo Novoa holds a doctorate in fantastic literature, and is a publisher and anthologist of the genre in Chile. He is also the director of the website: www.puerto-de-escape.cl. This review was originally published in: http://etcheverry.info/hoja/actas/notas/article_1779.shtml