During the late fall of 1987, in the years in which the new Argentine democracy was being reshaped after a decade of brutal right-wing dictatorships, the tomb of ex-President Juan Domingo Perón — the husband of Evita — was desecrated. His hands, which had modeled the country’s postwar political architecture — half of Argentines think he was a hero, the other half a disgrace — were cut off and taken away by a radical group of unknown political affiliation. In order to understand why Argentinian novelist Roque Larraquy wrote his recent novel Comemadre, a mutilated novel about the art of mutilating bodies, one must remember that the corpse of the other universal figure of twentieth-century Argentinian politics is missing his hands too. When radical leader Ernesto Che Guevara was captured and shot in Bolivia in 1967, his cadaver was deposited in a common grave at a nearby military base, but his hands were cut off and sent to Buenos Aires for identification in a jar of formaldehyde.
In a gesture of amazing boldness largely unnoticed in American literary circles, Coffee House Press recently published Larraquy’s novel, in an impeccable and quite smart translation by Heather Cleary — a tastemaker worth American readers’ attention for her close knowledge of what is new and interesting in Latin American writing and her deep understanding of the setting. The novel is composed of two loosely related short narratives. The first one takes place in 1907 — a moment in which Argentina seemed like a promised land, poised to become the world’s breadbasket. The second one jumps ahead to 2009 when, due to the previous year’s savage global financial crises, Argentina — though deeply identified with its self-perceived European roots — had to look east — to China, mainly — for grain markets to undergird its collapsing economy. Rescue Distance (Distancia de rescate), the celebrated novel by the also-Argentinian Samanta Schweblin, has as its frame the same identity crises: a nation that, built from the immigration of working-class white people, while imagining itself a European country outside of Europe, finds itself becoming the soy farm of China.
In the first part of Comemadre, a boys-only medical club organizes and executes a murderous operation in the name of the progress of science. They decapitate poor terminal patients using slick, modern guillotines, in order to register the patients’ last words in the seconds during which the severed heads remain animated. The story is told through the journal of a doctor taking notes on the project. Larraquy’s embodiment of this monstrous figure is wonderfully elegant. With merciless irony recalling Thomas De Quincy’s “Murder as One of the Fine Arts,” a wildly popular 1872 satirical account of a lecture to a gentleman’s club detailing the aesthetic appreciation of homicidal violence, Larraquy’s doctor effortlessly filters any recognition that his project of controlling everything — from the future expression of Argentinian DNA to the only female involved in the decapitation project (a nurse, of course) — might have terrible consequences. The reader proceeds with a cringing smile that sometimes turns to laughter and sometimes horror. During a barbecue one of the doctors, stirred up by wine, toasts the group’s prospects for dominion over racially purified Americas through science and Catholicism. The abject submission of the nurse — “Ms. Menéndez” — to the doctor’s degrading advances is by the end of the novel a metaphor for Argentians’ successive surrenders to the toxic strongmen that shaped its destiny during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Àlvaro Enrigue is the author of five novels, three books of short stories, and one of literary criticism in Spanish; among these his novels Sudden Death and Hypothermia have been translated into English. He was born in Mexico and lives in New York City.
Read more! Àlvaro Enrigue’s full essay is available to subscribers on our website. Roque Larraquy himself will visit Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore on October 5th to talk novels and translation with translator Heather Cleary.
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