Aigerim TazhiPaper-Thin Skin

Abstract

Carlos Manuel Álvarez The Fallen Trans. Frank Wynne. London. Fitzcarraldo Editions. 2019. 131 pages. In January of this year, I had the pleasure of meeting Carlos Manuel Álvarez in Havana. We met at Café Fortuna Joe, a hipstery coffee house in Playa, a municipality of Havana. We exchanged books and discussed Sergio Pitol, whom I translate and, it turns out, is a writer whom Álvarez greatly admires. I offer this as a preface in the interest of full disclosure. Los caídos is not the book I expected. (I mentiontheSpanishtitlebecauseIreaditfirst in Spanish.) That is to say, it is not the descendant of the twentieth-century Cuban neobaroque —Lezama Lima, Sarduy, Arenas—to which many readers of Cuban literature may be accustomed; it possesses none of the Joycean wordplay one finds in Cabrera Infante (although Álvarez regards Cabrera Infante’s journalism as one of his major influences); it is not the detective novel of Leonardo Padura, the dirty realism of Pedro Sánchez, or the testimonial narrative of Miguel Barnet; nor is it the anti-Castrist autofiction of his rough contemporary Wendy Guerra. On the contrary , unlike Guerra’s narrative, Álvarez’s critique of Castrism is not trumpeted in solipsistic fanfare. It is delivered in the mournful rhythm of the bolero. With The Fallen we are witness to the birth of a new wave of Cuban prose, influenced by the crónica (a hybrid journalistic genre that is at once informative and interpretive ), conceived out of his formal training as a journalist, and nurtured by his literary mentors, among whom Capote and Wolfe figure prominently. And Hemingway. In fact, there is much of Hemingway in The Fallen, most of all Hemingway’s restrained prose, “stripped to its firm young bones,” as Dorothy Parker described it. Structurally, the novel is divided into five numbered sections, which in turn are divided into four monologues, labeled successively : The Son (Diego, who is finishing his compulsory military service), The Mother (Mariana, a teacher who has become homebound due to epilepsy), The Father (Armando, a fervent socialist who manages a state-owned luxury hotel), and The Daughter (María, who, disillusioned with socialism, has abandoned her education to work as a waitress in the hotel her father manages). Together, and separately, these characters represent the disparate but overlapping lives of today’s Cubans. Álvarez begins his novel with an exordium : “Everyone has a home and that’s where the troubles begin,” an apt epigraph for a novel that depicts the psychic trauma inflicted on a Cuban family in the 1990s, an era of extreme hardship and deprivation referred euphemistically to as the período especial (special period), a euphemism ÁlvaBooks in Review CARLOS MANUEL ÁLVAREZ ly popular in Germany, and it certainly does not follow any of the traditional murder, investigation, twist, and arrest plots favored by many crime writers. Instead, the main protagonist is Lou, whom we encounter as a young schoolgirl in the 1970s, then follow as she grows up into an intelligent teenager in her final year at school before meeting her again as an adult in Paris. We witness the impact of her dysfunctional mother, her stepfather’s care, and her attitude to friendships. She is involved in small pranks in her youth, and at the start of his career, Ohayon is sent to her village to investigate. Ohayon’s and Lou’s paths cross on several occasions without any premonition of what is to come. Yet as this story is told with the knowledge of later events, it is infused with a sense of foreboding and a feeling of impotence. It is only toward the end of the book, after a fatal shooting at the petrol station where Lou was working, that Ohayon begins to take an active interest in her. Yet contrary to crime-writing tropes, there is no arrest or guilty verdict and the investigation is quickly closed. It is up to the reader to decide on Lou’s involvement in the incident based on our peeks into her life and the actions of other shady characters around the village. The retrospective narrative reflects Die Tankstelle von Courcelles’s status as a prequel. It is most definitely the study...