Jethro’s Comments (group member since Aug 03, 2010)

Jethro’s comments from the And Other Stories Spanish-Language Reading Group group.

Ok, well I read this a few weeks ago now and decided not to post at the time but as nobody else has commented...

Some Argentinian novels (as well as many Latam films) are very good at examining politics without preaching or spelling things out. Things happen in the background, taken for granted by the protagonists, emphasising the misery and damage of living under an oppressive regime. Or sometimes politics seem to be absent but all choices made by the characters come as a consequence of or are influenced by their unjust circumstances.

In Los Topos something similar appears to be happening. The narrator is raised by his grandparents because his parents were killed by the regime. His girlfriend Romina is a member of HIJOS, activists who fight for the rights of the children of the disappeared. Maira, his lover, is a transvestite prostitute working as an undercover agent killing policemen, taking revenge on torturers from the past.

Everything is linked to or touched by the dictatorship. However, everything in the book is so confused that it is far from clear what the message is. Presumably, the idea is supposed to be that a repressed climate, or one in which it is impossible to ever learn the truth, will inevitably make people go mad; that a rein of terror leaves a legacy whereby everyone is paranoid and distrustful.

However, due to the childlike tone, short concentration span and immaturity of the narrator, as well as the rambling directionless narrative, the message I was left with was that the country should just bloody well grow up, get a grip and get over it. Which is surely not what the author intended.

I appreciate that the author is, like the character, the son of disappeared parents, though I didn't know that at the time I read it. In any case it should have no baring on whether I liked the book or not.

And I did not. Regardless of what the book is trying to say, the dreamlike narrative tired my patience. A breezy start promised much but as the story went off at tangent after tangent, I cared less and less about the characters (or at least the narrator as most others come and go every twenty pages) and grew bored. The book is supposed to be, like the characters (and like politics and society), confused, but while I can recognise that as a structural devise, even a statement, it made for a tiresome read.

I hope others fair better and can persuade me that I'm being unfair, that I'm an ignorant fool and missed the whole point, that it was just the wrong book at the wrong time (I'm on a bad run at the moment).

I read it differently. That he thinks the prostitutes are enjoying themselves with him is a symptom of his detachment from reality. It is also another aspect of being blinded by the power of money: he similarly confuses the loyalty of Atilio, the doorman, and Teresa, his secretary, as some form of kinship whereas servility and knowing which side your bread’s buttered are the real factors.

Andrada is clearly a self-delusional pervert, but I think the reader knows this and is aware that we are seeing events through his eyes. This is important so perhaps it could have been better underlined.

That we don’t go inside anyone else’s head is a device I quite like: it charts and magnifies Andrada’s growing obsession and madness. Being stuck inside his head is depressing and I also wanted him to get his comeuppance. However, although an unpleasant character, I still found him entertaining company, partly because he’s so contradictory and such a hypocrite. He feels he’s played by the rules and life has let him down and so he rebels. That his rebellion victimises a young girl is something he doesn’t see; in fact he sees the opposite: that he’s rescuing her.

My reading is much more generous of course but I’m even prepared to believe that Andrada knows he is being self-delusional, that it is part of his being so wilfully self-destructive.

For a little on the author and the book, and an extract in English click here: http://www.andotherstories.org/sergio...

I started the book on my way to Madrid and, once there, despite the many charms of the city and the friends I was visiting, all I wanted to do was finish reading it. And so I went to the park and did so.

It’s short, sharp and dark – just what I like from a book. It draws you in from the start and sets off at a cracking pace. If it perhaps can’t quite maintain the high tempo until the end, it runs its course soon enough and reaches its conclusion before the reader grows weary.

The storytelling is skilful and concise and the writing style spare. Olguin has joked that essentially he plagiarised George Simenon and if you’ve read any of the Belgian author’s roman dur (rather than his less-interesting Maigret books) you can only nod your head in approval. Simenon was brilliant at getting inside the head of a man gripped by madness and he also wrote with an incredible economy of style. Olguin is able to reproduce both.

Simenon was also great at depicting a city’s seedier side and Olguin is likewise strong at capturing the mood of the underbelly, be it when taking the reader into the shantytown or into the twisted mind of Andrade. The sex scenes manage to be seamy while somehow conveying the thrill Andrade is getting from the encounters. At least it seemed that way to a male reader; it would be interesting to know what females readers make of it as it did strike me as being a book of more obviously masculine appeal.

Olguin’s plotting is almost as good as Andrade’s. It moves the story constantly forward but also plays its part in ensuring the book has much to say while remaining non-judgemental: a murder is easily forgotten, one of many examples of the double-standards employed by the main characters (and us as readers). Incidental or background events add up to a greater whole which speaks of a rotten society and it is this, in classic noir tradition, that lift the book above being a simple thriller.