Balada

by Marcelo Cohen

Lerena Dost es una chica arrolladora y exitosa hasta que cae en su novio la abandona, la despiden del trabajo, le exigen dejar el departamento que alquila y su madre, a quien recurre buscando amparo, la rechaza. Parece una conspiración para todos la acusan de ser una manipuladora.

Cuando Lerena empieza a sospechar que tienen razón, un encuentro providencial con una desconocida en un ascensor le brinda un número, que ella juega en la lotería. Y gana. Pero Lerena decide que no tocará un centavo de sus millones hasta que no encuentre a esa mujer y le haga una retribución. Lerena ignora que no persigue a unamujer cualquiera sino a alguien que acaso no crea en el agradecimiento y que no quiere dejarse encontrar. Es DielsiMunava, ex cantante y oscura guía espiritual de los Atinados, una organización social que controla entre sombras la región central de isla Asunde. Para encarar ese viaje, Lerena busca sostén en uno de los hombres quemás la conoció en la intimidad. Suano Botilecue, su ex psicólogo, un viejo amor y otra víctima de la personalidad de Lerena, no tiene claro qué deuda se propone pagar ella, ymientras la ayuda a averiguarlo hurga entre los rescoldos de una historia que lo hizo sufrir para descubrir qué permanece vivo y qué posibilidades hay de que una persona cambie.

Paperback

First published September 1, 2011

About the author

Marcelo Cohen es escritor y traductor. Publicó novelas, relatos y ensayos. Ha traducido a William Shakespeare, T.S. Elliot, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Raymond Roussel, Henry James, Fernando Pessoa, John Dos Passos, Ray Bradbury, Italo Svevo, Clarice Lispector, Harold Brodkey, James Ballard, Martin Amis, Chris Kraus, Alasdair Gray y A.R. Ammons, entre muchos otros.

Reviews

[Marie-Therese · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars.

An unexpected delight. Playful, inventive, thoughtful, and surprisingly gripping, this little novel details the oddest of road trips in a near-future world very like our own called the Panoramic Delta. Structured almost like an ouroboros* and abounding in clever neologisms and striking imagery, 'Melodrome' is one of the most sophisticated books I've read this year, yet also one of the easiest and most pleasurable to read (reminding me that great experimental literature should be fun to read and not a chore). I'd love to read other books by Cohen, a fairly prolific author (fourteen novels and five collections of short stories) who sometimes labels his work "fantastic sociology". Crossing my fingers that this excellent translation brings greater attention to his work in the English-speaking world.

*Chris Andrews, the book's gifted translator, calls it "a kind of narrative palindrome" and that's an apt description too.

[Giovanni Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Una suerte de éter anestesia las tácticas, y con las tácticas se duerme el rencor. Lo que hay es quebranto físico y apetito glandular. Qué ilimitada es la melancolía humana".

Una tirada de muchas. No la menos cursi, pero no importa. La idea de la curación esquiva, tan sabrosa estos días. O la herencia doble o triple Valenzuela/Bernhard/Saer, aunque la cronología merme el sentido.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another South American work from Giramondo's 'Southern Latitudes' translation project, this work by Cohen was first published in 2011 in Argentina. It's been translated by Chris Andrews, best known for his translations of Roberto Bolaño and César Aira and it's probably most akin to the work of the latter. This novella has science fictional trappings, but it's more about the play of language than anything else. It's a challenging read, but a good one to puzzle over.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another novella for #NovNov Novellas in November! Melodrome by Argentinian author Marcelo Cohen is really interesting reading, and at only 142 pages long, it’s easy to romp through it in a day. It’s from Giramondo’s Southern Latitudes series, indulging an interest in countries to the east and west of us, in our own hemisphere.
Vaguely Orwellian without being derivative, and offering a critique of neoliberal capitalism without being heavy-handed, Melodrome is set in an indefinable future. It’s the story of Lerena Dost, a successful woman in executive management, who undertakes a bizarre quest to thank an enigmatic benefactor. Lerena has lost her lover, her job and her home in short order but through quirky circumstances has won a major lottery. Uneasy about unearned income, she wants to thank Dona Munava, whose hint provided the winning numbers, but it turns out to be more difficult than she thought. So she enlists the help of her former lover, Suana Botilecue, a psychoanalyst who lost his job for having an unprofessional relationship with her and is now reduced to living among the homeless as their publicly-funded counsellor. (It is one of these homeless who narrates the story).
Lerena’s life has unravelled due to an unfortunate series of events. Her replacement lover dumped her because he thought she was manipulative, and she was so shocked that she wasn’t able to react with her usual assertiveness when her rental manager gave her notice to quit.

She was well acquainted with the miserly sadism of real estate administrators, the deals they did with the judges and the size of the bribes they demanded, but the guy was accusing her of fraudulently negotiating a rent reduction and manipulating the apartment’s elderly owner: the combination of charges left her gaping, with her tongue stuck to her palate. And she can’t be sure, but it may have been this silence that emboldened her boss to call her in to the personnel room two hours later and announce that, having observed for quite some time now how Lerena’s attitude, with its combination of arrogance, pride, intimidation, assertiveness, moral blackmail and manipulative skill, was inhibiting rather than motivating the team of analysts under her supervision, quashing rather than nurturing their spirit of initiative, and not only making them inefficient as employees but also damaging them as people, he had decided to replace her; that’s the word he used, replace, not dismiss or fire, when in fact he had already prepared her resignation, and produced it then for her to sign, along with a piece of paper on which the sum of her severance pay was crisply inscribed: seven thousand panoramics. (p.15-16)

‘Panoramics’ and ‘bitcards’ (securely encrypted money cards) are two of the many words coined to create a disorientating sense of a world familiar yet not quite our own, and the translator Chris Andrews has done a splendid job of rendering these in English. Lerena drives a mincar, stops at ‘anytime eatchas’ for a meal, sleeps overnight at a ‘lodgitel’ and visits a ‘sanit’ when nature calls. There are Clearseers for surveillance and Guards who enforce checkpoints that no one, not even the Guard, can explain.
So, Suano joins Lerena on this bizarre road trip, where everyone they meet already knows about their quest.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/11/10/m...

[Patricia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Realmente no me gustó, creo que perdí el tiempo leyéndolo.

[Phillip Mar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this as a love story, as about the possibility of redeeming something that is so abjectly broken. Lerena, a woman who destroys people without even knowing it and Suano, the psychotherapist who has been brought down so low he now gives conselling advice in a bar. But they are brought together in a circular - aren't they all - oddessey to find the woman who gave Lorena the winning numbers in a lottery. The journey through the strange countryside to the cultish community presided over by Dona Munava is a beautifully psychoanalytic space, full of ambiguous edges between dream and social analogy, agency and suspicion (is it all a setup, a whole world designed to trap me?). Cryptic but lucid I thought, with a great sense of the unknowability and doubt that is at the heart of the therapists intelligence. I liked the poetic neologisms for ordinary things. I read a nice interview with translator Chris Andrews, http://mascarareview.com/adventures-i... who talked about translating some of these terms - farphonito = mobile phone. Even the English title, Melodrome instead of Ballad for the original Balada pulled together from Greek words, melos (song) and dromos (course).

Yes I certainly want to read more of Marcelo Cohen - what else has been translated into English? I understand that other work is related in being fragments of a semi sci-fi universe, the Panoramic Delta. Can I go there again?

[Linda Solomon · Rating 2 out of 5]

not entirely sure what i just read

[Editorial Alfaguara]

Lerena Dost es una chica arrolladora y exitosa hasta que cae en desgracia: su novio la abandona, la despiden del trabajo, le exigen dejar el departamento que alquila y su madre, a quien recurre buscando amparo, la rechaza. Parece una conspiraci�n para aleccionarla: todos la acusan de ser una manipuladora. Cuando Lerena empieza a sospechar que tienen raz�n, un encuentro providencial con una desconocida en un ascensor le brinda un n�mero, que ella juega en la loter�a. Y gana. Pero Lerena decide que no tocar� un centavo de sus millones hasta que no encuentre a esa mujer y le haga una retribuci�n. Lerena ignora que no persigue a unamujer cualquiera sino a alguien que acaso no crea en el agradecimiento y que no quiere dejarse encontrar. Es DielsiMunava, ex cantante y oscura gu�a espiritual de los Atinados, una organizaci�n social que controla entre sombras la regi�n central de isla Asunde. Para encarar ese viaje, Lerena busca sost�n en uno de los hombres quem�s la conoci� en la intimidad. Suano Botilecue, su ex psic�logo, un viejo amor y otra v�ctima de la personalidad de Lerena, no tiene claro qu� deuda se propone pagar ella, ymientras la ayuda a averiguarlo hurga entre los rescoldos de una historia que lo hizo sufrir para descubrir qu� permanece vivo y qu� posibilidades hay de que una persona cambie.

[Facundo Valverde · Rating 2 out of 5]

Con un estilo agil, sin demasiada preocupación por la transición entre momentos, la trama va sobreviviendo hasta que el lector empieza a impacientarse por la arbitrariedad del uso de neologismos que a veces remedan más al lenguaje con el que nos dirigimos a un niño o al lenguaje que alguien que no tiene demasiadas luces usa para mostrarse especial. (millatros, cafeto, Cordillen, papelulue y así)

Highlights que uno debe mencionar para mostrar que efectivamente leyó el libro
El papel del psicologo como empleado público que atiende a los deshauciados pobres, en un rincón de un bar.

[Claudio Coronel · Rating 5 out of 5]

una genialidad el universo que inventa Cohen para contarnos una historia de dos. Y más.