Morir en Isla Vista. Novela del Destierro by Víctor Fuentes

Abstract

Reviewed by: Morir en Isla Vista. Novela del Destierro by Víctor Fuentes Erick Dickey Fuentes, Víctor. Morir en Isla Vista. Novela del Destierro. Editorial Verbum, 2021. Pp. 240. ISBN 978-84-1337-727-8. Morir en Isla Vista is a non-traditional Spanish novel written by Víctor Fuentes that details the life of the Spanish exile living in the United States in the post-Spanish Civil War era. Unlike many Spanish exiles who fled Spain in the early months of 1939, Víctor Fuentes belongs to the generation of the “children of the civil war” who left Spain in 1954 and whose life as an exile would be embodied by numerous exiles that would take him from Spain to Venezuela, to New York and finally to Isla Vista, California as a Spanish professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. Adapting to life in exile proved to be difficult for Fuentes as the novel relates the many struggles that he faced integrating into his new adopted homeland particularly in the early years where he was forced to find menial jobs in order to survive financially. While the novel relates in diary form the many vicissitudes and personal troubles suffered by Fuentes throughout his life, such as his failed relationships, battles with depression and psychosis, and difficulties writing novels, the memory of Spain and the Spanish Civil War pervades the text. This becomes a recurring theme in exile literature, as the exile, who is separated and alienated from his home-land and longs to return to Spain, is forced to live off of memory. Therefore, the continual remembrance of Spain and his fellow exiles represents Fuentes’s endeavor to reconstruct new memory traces as their identity has been erased by the Franco dictatorship. This multifaceted novel veers from the traditional narrative structure of the post-war novel with Fuentes’s use of the Cervantine model of the found and transcribed manuscript in addition to the incorporation of multiple narrative voices that combine fiction with reality. It is also a work that reflects on one of the most important and recurring issues within the body of Spanish exile literature, namely the continual remembering of the mother country. The novel begins with the discovery of a corpse in the water, which is that of the author Víctor Fuentes. This initiates what one could call the appearance of the “split narrator” or “Yo-dividido” as Fuentes interjects himself as a character in his own novel recounting his life in exile as the narrative shifts between first- and second-person narrators. This symbolizes the metaphorical “death” of the exile as he is forced to reconstruct a new identity in exile, cut off and separated from his mother country, but still remains as the “other” in the adopted homeland. Upon Fuentes’s mysterious death, his narrative takes shape as a second narrator appears—the Transcriber—who reconstructs the life story of Fuentes’s exilic journey by recovering Fuentes’s discarded writings left in a box. As the Transcriber, he also takes the liberty of inserting, when he deems it appropriate, some critical commentary on Fuentes’s works and bears the responsibility of completing Fuentes’s unfinished text much like Cide Hamete Benengeli in the Quijote. The plurality of narrative voices is Fuentes’s way of creating a collective identity or memory for the exile community. More than an autobiography, this text could be seen as a co-biography given the many voices that appear in it. Fuentes’s narrative represents the memories of the Republican children of a collective suffering, which is illustrated by Fuentes’s usage of a Hispanic “Yo-nosotros” living in exile in the United States. Here Fuentes problematizes the question of the identity of the exiled. The allusion to the “I-we” dichotomy has now merged into what Fuentes believed to be the great deed of the collective subject. Fuentes is determined to rescue the memory of these individuals from what he terms “oblivion and the destructive [End Page 166] clutches of time.” He accomplishes this by enumerating a list of exiles who died and briefly describing their contributions in exile in the United States while also remembering...