Guillermo SaccomannoThe Clerk by Andrea G. Labinger

Abstract

The book has no straightforward plot, no rising action or dramatic twist; instead, it is a relentless march forward. The book becomes a joyous tribute to love and family , and it symbolizes a funeral procession for those lost. But it never stops moving. As Karimi repeats throughout the book, “the only way forward is through the alphabet.” Karimi often speaks directly to the reader and attempts to demonstrate how the structure of the story works. She invites the reader to enter and exit, to take whatever they can or want to take from the story. She describes it as a kaleidoscope, as “movable type—immovable in their mission,” or as a home for the dead. However, she makes it clear what the story is not: “If you seek biography, look elsewhere. It is a dream I offer you.” Above Us the Milky Way is a story of immeasurable tragedy but also of hope and acceptance. The book works to define what home is and looks for answers to questions about the human experience. It is a book of introspection rather than retrospection, encouraging readers to follow its example and look inward at their own lives. Samantha Tonkins University of Oklahoma Books in Review Guillermo Saccomanno The Clerk Trans. Andrea G. Labinger. New York. Open Letter. 2020. 150 pages. “AT THIS TIME of night, the armored helicopters fly over the city, the bats flutter against the office windows, and the rats scurry among the desks engulfed in darkness , all the desks but one, his, with the computer turned on, the only one that’s on at this hour.” So begins Guillermo Saccomanno’s novel The Clerk,* a neo-noir tale that relates the bleak existence of an office worker debased by the drudge of an all-but-meaningless life in a city besieged by gangs, terrorists, and a militarized police presence. Although many reviewers have labeled The Clerk a dystopic novel, rather than a dystopia brought on by war or climate change, which are tangential elements here, The Clerk offers us a dystopia of alienation and dehumanization triggered by late-stage capitalism-cum-neoliberalism, enforced by a hypermilitarized state. In this way, The Clerk could be set in Argentina in the 1970s, like the author’s earlier novel 77 (if not for the cell phones), or present-day Chile. Instead, The Clerk transpires in a nameless city, in a near future, of cloned dogs and cloned babies, surveillance helicopters, guerrilla attacks, and a virus, a city where the elderly die in nursing-home fires and students and teachers are massacred in school shootings. The parallels to the current day, especially to the United States, are striking. The appearance of the translation now is particularly timely. Winner in 2010 of Seix Barral’s Biblioteca Breve Novel Prize (previous winners have been a who’s who of Hispanic literature, including Goytisolo, Vargas Llosa, Cabrera Infante, Puig, Fuentes, and Poniatowska), The Clerk is Saccomanno’s third novel (after Gesell Dome and 77) to be translated by Andrea G. Labinger and published by Open Letter. Structurally, the novel is made up of fifty-five short chapters—some less than a page long—which provide the reader voyeuristic glimpses into the protagonist’s dreary day-to-day life (“the dandruff and hair loss torment him”) against a backdrop of a city plagued by violence (“Two drug dealers on a motorcycle gun down a minister”). The novel narrates the life of a nameless protagonist (everything and everyone in The Clerk is nameless), a Kafkaesque clerk, as disillusioned by his job as his home, where he lives with his wife, “a sour, despotic sort,” known only as “the woman,” and his children, whom the narrator describes as “a litter of obese, ill-behaved brats” who “demand electronic devices, fashionable clothing, astronaut-style sneakers, a car, [and] vacations,” except, that is, for a sickly albino son known as “El Viejito,” for whom the clerk feels sympathy, in the same way he feels sympathy for his own pitiful existence. (Labinger’s decision to add the appositive phrase “the little old man” to explicate “El Viejito” seems out of place here. While a common strategy in literary translation, the translator should...