Mempo Giardinelli in the Wake of Utopia

Abstract

my two sons who were very small then. They gave it back to me. They said: 'Papa, you think that children are really dumb.' (Love and Talk 19). The most internationally visible part of Latin American literature (Borges, Garcia Mairquez, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, Paz) owes its current popularity to the fact that it deals with a very narrow field of strategies and myths already familiar to the dumb reader: those of that narcissistic recipe known as magical realism. During the sixties, that decade of frenzy and insurrection, that time of rupture and iconoclastic attitudes, there arrived at the outskirts of the Western World the echoes of Paris and Berkeley, the rhythm and the refreshing ethics of the Beatles, the nuptials of the Marx of 1844 with the adaptation of psychoanalysis to the industrialized society, the desolate and nonconformist images of Godard and Antonioni like reflections of the existential abandonment of contemporary man, as capable of landing on the moon as of incurring the bombings of napalm over Vietnam. In this decade, Latin America (until then considered a ghetto of shame in the eyes of their ancient wealthy colonizers) discovered its fraternal ties with the rest of the Third World by means of solidarity with the efforts of the independent movements in Asia and Africa. Mestizo America rediscovered its roots, and its literature had access to the international market by way of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel written by a Colombian in Mexico and edited in Argentina. A rich tradition of social stories, Utopian essays and humanitarian poetry was on its way to start a dialogue with those most prestigious and translated works of Europe and the United States. If in 1967 it was not a surprise that the Nobel prize was granted to a Guatemalan, then that of 1982 for Garcia Mairquez would emanate an almost putrid fragrance of unanimous nostalgia, as if it had already been presaged in the Melquiades' parchments. The decade of the seventies still would have heroes, like doctor Allende, engulfed in the flames of La Moneda Palace, but above all, it would contain deception. The Southern Cone dictators would expel from their lands thousands of intellectuals. In that context of destroyed printings, muzzled newspapers, assassinated journalists and professors, banned books and some few surviving intellectuals, self-censored even in private conversations, Latin American literature began to be written by a new kind of exile, not the adventurous and petty bourgeois exile of Barcelona, Paris or New York, where some boom writers found a stimulating atmosphere, lucrative awards, efficient translators and friendly critics, but rather a hostile exile, aggravated by the international financial catastrophe, exacerbated by unemployed natives, embittered by indifferent bureaucrats, wounded by the remembrance of fallen brothers: an exile toward that which no one had left because he or she had wanted to, at times without crossing the border. The 1983 National Prize for the Novel, in Mexico, produced a double surprise: the winner was a foreigner, the Argentine Mempo Giardinelli, and his work was an atypical detective story, Hot Moon. Giardinelli was born in 1947 in Resistencia, the capital of the province of Chaco, on the northern border of Argentina. Chaco shares a Guarani ethnic and linguistic substratum with its neighbor