Feb 012015
 

OndjakiClose

This past summer, I reviewed Angolan author Ondjaki’s novel Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret right here at Numéro Cinq. I loved the book, which read like a fun kid’s action/adventure film from the 1980s, and thanks to modern technology, Ondjaki and I began chatting on Twitter after he saw the review. Over time, our conversation—a direct message or email here and there across several months—turned into an interview, which is transcribed below. 

— Benjamin Woodard

 


Benjamin Woodard (BW):
What drew you into wanting to become a storyteller?

Ondjaki (O): ​I really don’t know. I guess each time someone asks this, a writer lies. I happen to like short stories, tales, and literature in general. One gets caught up in this “thing” of reading, and then eventually comes the writing.​

BW: Granma Nineteen… is only your third work translated into English. How interested are you in having your work translated? Is it important to you to have your stories reach a non-Portuguese speaking audience?

O: I am not that worried about that. I mean, I really think these things [translations] happen as they do, when they do. It’s important to me to be happy with a short story, a poem, a book. Of course translations open new doors. I don’t mean that I don’t care, but “important” could be a strong word. I see it as I write, and then some translations happen. I am happy with the result so far.​

Granma

BW: You mention “being happy with a short story, a poem, a book.” What kind of process does a piece go through before you consider it finished? Does it vary?

O: I think it does. And many times I guess it’s a shot in the dark. When and how can one say “it’s ready”? I’ve had things that took me a year or two to “become” ready. And I also have pieces that took five years. Sometimes, when you’re just “preparing” (which I think is also writing), the idea can linger for more than five or ten years. In the end, you have to be happy with the result. But trying to be happy now, and forty-three years from now, it’s a long shot in the dark future…

BW: Branching off of this, you’ve amassed a rather large library of published work already in your literary career. Is seems you must have quite a bit of discipline when it comes to writing. Could you expand on your writing schedule?

O: You cannot imagine how I am laughing right now. Discipline? Me? I don’t think I recognize the word. Not when it comes to writing. I really do a tremendous effort to “wait” for the right moment. I keep working things in my mind, but as for the writing moment I tend to think there has to be some sort of magic. Or not. I convince myself that I write when “everything in me” is ready. I do not mean to bullshit, it’s just what I feel. For now. That’s why, in fact, I love short stories more than the rest. They tell me when they want to show up. Novels, yes, they require some sort of schedule, but it’s more just being available. Waiting. Like when you go fishing or hunting: it’s not about the amount you catch. It’s about the quality of the waiting time. I am still a beginner, but I “began” to understand that it’s important to wait. Just wait. The poem will come. The short story will come. Or not. I think writing is also about learning to be untroubled with both of these results.

BW: What was your literary exposure growing up? The boys in Granma Nineteen… seem to have a steady diet of 1980s adventure films, and their story reads like a children’s adventure film. Do any of these forms of media come into play with your writing?

O: I remember, after Asterix and some stuff like that, reading some “serious” Brazilian authors (Erico Verissimo, and then Graciliano Ramos), and Gracialiano was so powerful and “dry” and sad. But I liked it right away. After, don’t ask me why, I chose to read Sartre. Two or three years later, Garcia Márquez would be the most important of writers. Now, about the movies, I actually forced myself to remember certain films for the book, and that’s also to honor those days in which fiction also came into our lives through cinema and television. By fiction, I mean movies, but also soap operas. And I am aware that these were very important for my generation, so it’s also for them that I include some scenes or movies. It’s also for me: I actually would like to be there right now. If I could use a time machine only once, I know where I would go: a magical place, dusty, yellow, called the 80’s. That’s me. Still today.

Nausea

BW: How old were you when you read Sartre? That seems pretty intense for a kid to read.

O: I think I was around fourteen. It was…somehow it was different. I remember I got two books at the same time, Márquez and Sartre’s Nausea. I did like Nausea’s main character a lot. He was lonely, he was weird, he seemed to me like a sad real person. I am not sure how much I got from that book then. It does not really matter. Every book is different each time we open it. Not so much the book, necessarily, but we are different readers in different moments of our lives. And I was in that sad mood at fourteen. Right after or right before that, I read The Hermit, the only Ionesco novel. Another sad character, another strange book. It made sense during those days. I am not sure I know why. I am not sure I want to remember why.

BW: Who do you look to as an example of a great writer?

O: I think books are more important than writers. But, right now, I guess there are three names I could not leave out of this answer: Ruy Duarte de Carvalho (Angola), Raduan Nassar (Brazil) and Erri De Luca (Italy). Any of these three (and two are still among us) should have won the Nobel.

BW: What makes you say that “books are more important than writers”? Do you mean that they are bigger than the authors who construct them, or more influential?

O: They are bigger, for sure. It’s what’s within the books that counts the most. Not the writers. It’s the body of a poem, not the hand who wrote it. It’s the memory that we have of a tree or a mountain, not so much the tree itself. Maybe the important part of a book is what you feel (or what you become) while you’re reading it. Do you feel a change in your skin or smile when you read something? Can a few (or a thousand) words change what you feel, what you are? Can a poem convince you that you can fly for thirty-seven seconds? Did you think that you could fly for thirty-seven seconds and a book made you fly for forty-nine seconds? It’s always about the meeting point between you (the reader) and the book. Sometimes, so many times, magic happens in that place.

BW: Does travel influence your writing at all? Am I correct in thinking that you now live in Brazil?

O: I think I live in Brazil now. This is where I stop most of the time. I travel a lot, I try not to, but sometimes I do travel a lot. I don’t know how it reaches my writing. I really don’t. I tend to like meeting new people and seeing cities, but sometimes it’s too much. Too many eyes, too many voices, too many airplanes. So lately airports are strange places for me. They make me sad, especially when I am returning from any place I call home. Luanda is still home for me. It’s a place that stays inside, though I’m not sure if it’s still the real Luanda. I don’t write exactly about the places I visit. Usually it’s more about the remains of those places in me. People. Moments. Trees. Colors. Shadows. Dreams. Hands. Shoes. Fogs. (Secret: sometimes I think I live somewhere in a lost bridge between now and the past.) I spend too much time not in the present. And I pay the price.

— Ondjaki and Benjamin Woodard


Ondjaki
was born in Luanda, Angola in 1977. He studied in Lisbon and Portugal. Ondjaki is the author of five novels, three short story collections and various books of poems and stories for shildren. He has also made a documentary film, May Cherries Grow, about his native city. His books have been translated into eight languages and have earned him important literary prizes in Angola, Portugal and Brazil. In 2008 Ondjaki was awarded the Grizane for Africa Prize in the category of Best Young Writer. In 2012, The Guardian named him one of its Top Five African Writers. Good Morning Comrades marked Ondjaki’s first appearance in English. Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret, launcing Spring 2014, is his newest English translation.

Woodard Bigger

Benjamin Woodard lives in Connecticut. His recent fiction has appeared in Cheap PopdecomP magazinE, and Spartan. In addition to Numéro Cinq, his reviews have been featured in, or are forthcoming from, Kenyon Review, Necessary FictionPublishers WeeklyRain Taxi Review of Books, and other fine publications. You can find him at benjaminjwoodard.com and on Twitter.

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Jul 032014
 

Ondjaki

Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret succeeds both through its deconstruction of the adventure story and in its full embrace of the genre … one can only hope that more of Ondjaki’s work finds its way through the translation process. His is a voice the entire world should have the pleasure to experience. — Benjamin Woodard

9781927428658_p0_v2_s260x420

Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret
Ondjaki
Translated from Portuguese by Stephen Henighan
Biblioasis
192 pages ($18.95)
ISBN 978-1927428658

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Angolan author Ndalu de Almeida, who writes under the mononymous pen name, Ondjaki, is something of a literary wunderkind: at 36 years of age, he has already published 20 books, won the José Saramago Prize for Literature, and been named one of Africa’s best writers by The Guardian. And yet, though celebrated throughout his homeland, Europe, and South America, he remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. This is unfortunate, for the newly released Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret, a devilishly simple-yet-sturdy tale of childhood and revolution (and just the third work of Ondjaki’s to appear in English), proves how behind the curve we English-speakers are: so often doused by literature hampered by the overly serious, Ondjaki’s writing, full of humanity, vivacity, and character, is a whimsical breath of fresh air.

Skillfully translated by Stephen Henighan, Granma Nineteen is set in Luanda, Angola in the 1980s, years after Angola’s independence from Portugal, but firmly entrenched in the country’s long civil war (which mostly occurs off-screen), and follows the daily lives of the residents of Bishop’s Beach, a community of mostly children and grandmothers. The story is told through the eyes of a young, nameless boy, as he and his friends (in particular Pi, or 3.14) wander the neighborhood and mingle with a menagerie of delightfully nicknamed locals—Comrade Gas Jockey, Crazy Sea Foam, Dr. KnockKnock—and equally interesting Soviet troops, who occupy the land in an effort to support the ruling political party. The troops are also overseeing the construction of a massive, rocket-shaped mausoleum to house the corpse of fallen President Agostinho Neto, and it’s this structure that sparks the novel’s conflict: rumors arise that the Soviets plan on dynamiting, or “dexploding,” several homes in the beachside community to expand the tomb. Hearing these whispers, the children decide to take on the Soviets, planning a secret attack on the mausoleum in hopes of driving the invaders away before their land is destroyed.

The novel opens in medias res: there is an explosion in Bishop’s Beach, and as the dust begins to settle, it appears as if the neighborhood’s giant mausoleum has started to crumble. From here, Ondjaki leaps backward in time to tell the story leading up to this moment. It’s a well-worn trick, the flashback, one often used in action films, where the viewer is immediately dropped into the action, only to then step back and learn about the situation. Adding to this, Granma Nineteen’s premise certainly reads as if it lifted elements from the plots of many children’s adventure films from the 1980s (think The Goonies, or Explorers, or Red Dawn). But what’s intriguing about Ondjaki’s story is how fully aware it is of these familiar tropes. Rather than existing as a paint-by-numbers adventure, the novels functions as almost a commentary on the formula, with Ondjaki’s narrator constantly referring to the films he and his friends take in at the local cinema as they plan their attack. These children know how movies work, and apply this knowledge to create an adventure. For example, the first time the gossip of dynamite being smuggled in by the Soviets is raised, 3.14 says, “In cowboy movies dynamite is for blowing up trains, houses or even caves, to find gold” (18). This reference to cinema continues two pages later, when the narrator spies on the mausoleum from his bathroom. He turns off the light to remain invisible to the outside world. “I’d learned this from a war movie,” he says (20).

By constantly having his characters live out and reference moments from their favorite films, Ondjaki’s narrative succeeds on two fronts: first, a steady verbal rhythm is created. The word “movie” appears 26 times throughout the thin volume, and with each mention, the reader is simultaneously transported back to the previous mentions (a flashback-within-a-flashback, if you will) while also propelled forward within the narrative. This creates a wonderful looping rhythm to both the piece and the language within. Secondly, these moments reinforce to the reader the fantasy that is the novel: Only in a film would a ragtag group of youngsters take on a military force with nothing but their wits and courage. And this is where Ondjaki’s flashback structure also helps cleverly underline the narrative as that of playful, rambunctious popcorn. Knowing the mausoleum will be ruined at the beginning of the story allows the reader to fully embrace the events that lead up to the explosion.

In using a child’s perspective, Ondjaki writes a political rally cry of a novel without ever having to dedicate space to heavy political rhetoric. Angola in the 1980s was a cog in the Cold War, but these ideas mean nothing to a child. As such, while Ronald Reagan is mentioned, it is through the beak of a parrot as the children launch their attack:

We ran forward, then went in stealthily along the side of the veranda so that Granma wouldn’t call us. The yard was dark. The parrot His Name shouted out to expose us: “Down with Amer-ican imperialism.” We made an effort not to laugh: the words came from a television commercial that hadn’t run in a long time. Just Parrot finished off: “Hey, Reagan, hands off Angola.” (143)

Instead of talking politics, then, Ondjaki’s protagonist and his friends stumble through their adventure chatting about the things that ring true to children: cheating in games, the proper way to make fun of a superior, and the queasiness of the fairer sex. These are children who threaten to “smash your face in” (36) one moment, and then barter the next, as in when 3.14 and our hero attempt to procure a pair of pliers from Madalena, another child:

“You guys…You talk and talk and you don’t say anything.”
“You’re the one who’s not replying.”
“What was the question?”
“The question was about the pliers.”
“There must be a pair in the toolbox.”
“You can’t just lend them to us?”
“‘Just lend them’? Just how?”
“Just like that.”
“And if they catch me in Granma’s stuff. Aren’t they ‘just’ going to give me a thrashing?”
“No, Granma will only give you a kind of thrashing.”
“I can go see if they’re there.”
“Thank you, Madalena.”
“What’s this thank-you stuff? Thank you is what you say to the Comrade Teacher in school. Here there’s going to have to be salt for us to eat with green mangoes.”
“But haven’t you got the key to the pantry?”
“No. It’s in the display cabinet.”
“And the key to the display cabinet?”
“It’s in Granma’s room.”
It was agreed: salt in exchange for the pliers. Later she showed us a huge pair of pliers with a plastic grip that would be great for cutting an electric cable. We had already seen this in movies and everybody knew that to cut electric cables you had to be wearing shoes, wrap the pliers in a piece of cloth and not have wet hands or feet. (39)

Ondjaki rarely employs dialogue tags in exchanges like this, which adds to the chaotic nature of the moment. This chaos highlights an interesting concept: The reader doesn’t really need to know when 3.14 or the narrator or Madalena is speaking, for in the land of children, it’s less about who is speaking, and more about the end result of the conversation. Want conquers all. And here, Ondjaki also returns to the motif of cinema, lending the dialogue an association with the rapid-fire tête-à-têtes found in the screwball comedies of Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks. Again, the escapism of the children influences their lives.

In the end, Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret succeeds both through its deconstruction of the adventure story and in its full embrace of the genre. Added to this are Ondjaki’s quirks—the children wonder if Crazy Sea Foam has a pet alligator, the titular grandmother earns her moniker after losing a toe—and his uses of magical realism—one of the grandmothers turns out to be a ghost—which combine to build a story unique in its straightforwardness. In finishing Granma Nineteen, one can only hope that more of Ondjaki’s work finds its way through the translation process. His is a voice the entire world should have the pleasure to experience.

 — Benjamin Woodard

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Woodard

Benjamin Woodard lives in Connecticut. His recent fiction has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Cheap Pop, decomP magazinE, and Cleaver Magazine. In addition to Numéro Cinq, his reviews have been featured in Necessary Fiction, Publishers Weekly, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and other fine publications. You can find him at benjaminjwoodard.com and on Twitter.

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Jan 062014
 

Segura

Mauricio Segura’s Eucalyptus, part of the Biblioasis International Translation Series, is a novel about identity and ownership, a narrative that drops a (relative) stranger into a (relative) strange land and lets the skeletons tumble from the closet. This may sound familiar. And yet, Segura avoids the clichés normally associated with these kinds of stories, twisting Eucalyptus into a strange, existential whodunnit. As I wrote in my review, “Segura isn’t quite interested in ‘you can’t go home again’ platitudes. Rather, he finds fascination in more oblique questions: What is home? Who truly belongs to a parcel of land? And it is these queries that make Eucalyptus an adventurous, hypnotic read.”

The following excerpt comes from chapter two, chosen because it does a great job representing not only Segura’s skills at immersing the reader in location, but also the thematic ideas of identity and ownership that pervade the narrative. There isn’t much one needs to know to appreciate this snippet: Alberto, Eucalyptus‘s protagonist, has just traveled to Chile with his young son, Marco, to bury his father, Roberto. In chapter one, the duo come across Araya, Alberto’s uncle, who tells Alberto a tale that paints Roberto in a cold light. As chapter two opens, Alberto and Marco are waiting for Roberto’s sister, Noemi, to meet them.

— Benjamin Woodard

Eucalyptus

In the middle of the afternoon, tired of waiting for Noemi to come back, tired of the stale odour in the house, Alberto took off in the pickup with Marco. His elbow propped on the open window, he watched, through the rear-view mirror, the light wind at play in his son’s hair. When he turned into the Avenida Pablo Neruda, a flash of sunlight created a blinding spot on the windshield, with a rainbow-coloured aura. He passed square after square, and although on many of them youngsters were playing football or marbles, although the benches shone bottle- green, although no litter was lying about, they all seemed drab, desolate. Was it the concrete covering the ground? Or the smog that, like an ulterior motive, darkened the city in full daylight?

He parked the pickup in front of a glass building, in which were reflected the movie theatre’s heavy columns, encrusted with dirt. He bought some fried cheese empanadas, Marco’s favourite, in a nearby grocery store, and they ate them in the shade of a palm tree, on a bench in the Plaza de Armas. As the fountain shot its jet of water towards the sky in a deafening cloud, he scanned an election poster on a lamppost. “Francisco Huenchumilla, Concertación candidate for mayor of Temuco. Para un ciudad próspera.” He wondered if Temuco had ever had a native mayor. Behind them, music from another time, childlike and gay, drifted into the square. A man with a hand organ was drawing all eyes. On his shoulder, a monkey munched peanuts and made faces. When he saw Marco watching the show, wide-eyed, Alberto remembered his first impressions of the city when, after having left Chile at the age of four, he returned with his family. At the time everything seemed dirty and old-fashioned; the cars, the excessive pollution, the shifty faces of the street children, the cadaverous features of the women kneeling on the sidewalk, selling Kleenex or mote con huesillo. And then, during the same visit, he went from one extreme to the other: he suddenly felt as if he were being reunited with a buried part of himself. He didn’t want to leave. But this honeymoon didn’t last: people, his extended family above all, made him understand that he was not quite one of them, that in certain respects, perhaps the most important, he was too gringo, a remark they let drop, sometimes in jest, at other times in all seriousness. Since then, he had never felt at home either here or back there.

A little girl, her hair held back with pink ribbons, was walking with her mother, a balloon in her hand. He bought one for Marco, and made a knot for him at his wrist with the string; from that point on his son kept his eyes on the balloon, a smile on his lips. They strolled, and soon came on itinerant sellers of every age, set up in front of a shopping centre, behind wool blankets on which were displayed miniature tanks, lighters, ballpoint pens, underpants. Alberto told himself that Araya’s story was not at all surprising. He was like that, his father, totally unpredictable, loving to spring surprises and to make a scene, seeking always to protect his moral and material independence.

“And what are going to do now your papa’s dead?” asked Marco.

The question pulled him up short.

“Don’t worry about me.”

And he tried to smile.

“Fleurette says we go up to heaven when we die.”

Fleurette was his schoolteacher.

“You think Abuelo’s going to heaven?”

“If he behaved well, yes. If not, perhaps no.”

“Did he behave well?”

Alberto shrugged his shoulders.

Then, a bit farther on:

“Papa, but why did he die, Abuelo?”

He met his son’s eyes.

“Are you going to die one day, too?”

He nodded, yes.

Seeing his son’s concern, he added:

“Don’t bother about that. It won’t be for many years. We’ve lots of good times ahead of us.”

He gripped his hand a little more tightly.

*  *  *

Back in his grandparents’ house, he went upstairs with Marco to the room where his father was laid out. Abuela, still sitting in front of the window, raised her head and blinked her eyes when they appeared, her wine-red manta accentuating her slumped shoulders. She stared at them, knitting her brows, then with a movement of her chin she ordered Alberto to introduce himself. When he revealed his identity, she repeated to herself, “Roberto’s son,” as if she no longer remembered Roberto but didn’t want to admit it. After a moment, as Alberto became conscious of the dim light surrounding him, she asked him curtly to leave, because the real Alberto was a boy living in Canada “who’s no bigger than that,” she said, stretching out the fingers of one hand. He replied that he was the boy, that he had visited her four years earlier. But she made a dismissive gesture with her index and middle fingers, indicating that he should leave. Then he took out of his pocket a watch with a chain, a present from his grandfather, went up to her and held it out. She took it, weighed it, and stared for a long time at the motionless hands, as if memories were working their way bit by bit up to the surface of her mind.

“It doesn’t work anymore?”

“For the last few days, it stops and starts. It has to be repaired.”

She gave it back to him, and venturing a smile, she said:

“It’s really you, Albertito?”

He held the watch and got on his knees at her feet. With her rough fingers, she patted Alberto’s hair and cheeks. He looked at her face, which, despite her yellowed eyes, despite the ravages of time, brought back to him a torrent of memories, of when he was Marco’s age and she kept him with her for entire days, before the dictatorship chased them out of the country again.

“You look more and more like Roberto,” she said, mussing his hair. “Do you have his character, too?” she asked, teasingly. “Ay, Dios mío, I hope not!” she added, smiling.

He returned her smile and pushed his face up against her skirts. He felt her own special odour attack his nostrils, one of wool, of tenderness, and of a madness she would not concede. He kept his eyes closed, persuaded that when he opened them he could remove himself from this oppressive climate of mourning.

She gestured to Marco that he should come near. Caressing his hands vigorously, as if she could not believe the softness of his skin, she asked him where his mother was. When the child explained that she had stayed in Canada, she looked at Alberto the way she used to when she was going to scold him.

“I’m not wrong, then?” she said. “You are like Roberto?”

Continuing to pass her hands through his curly hair, she raised her eyes to the ceiling and, in a stronger voice, as if she were addressing a large audience, embarked on a confused tirade against men and the desires that possess them like evil spirits. An evil she traced back to her dead husband, and her husband’s father, and his father before him. She went on with her monologue, digging deeper into the family’s past, and recalling, as she never failed to do, their ancestors’ arrival from Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, from an idyllic village called Monastir, today Bitola, at the heart of Macedonia. And Alberto was treated to the entire narrative of the family’s founding, only now it was timely, because although he knew it was a romanticized version, he needed to hear this story of emigration, of a flight by boat against the backdrop of a great conflagration, of the persecution of the Jewish community, and the decadence of the Ottoman Empire. Then, losing the thread of what she was saying, as if suddenly she had come back to herself and the weighty concerns of the present, she went silent. Her eyes darted this way and that, while at last tears ran down Alberto’s cheeks.

— Mauricio Segura, translated from the French by Donald Winkler

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Born in Chile in 1969, Mauricio Segura grew up in Montreal and studied at Université de Montréal and McGill University. A well-known journalist and documentary filmmaker, he is the author of three novels and a study of French perceptions of Latin America. He lives with his family in Montreal.

Donald Winkler is a Montreal-based literary translator and documentary filmmaker. He has translated books by the astrophysicist Hubert Reeves, the philosopher Georges Leroux and the novelists Daniel Poliquin and Nadine Bismuth. Winkler is a three-time winner of the Governor General of Canada’s Award for French-to-English translation.

Jan 052014
 

Segura

Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus
Mauricio Segura, translated from the French by Donald Winkler
Biblioasis
150 pages, $15.95
ISBN 978-1-927428-37-5

In Mauricio Segura’s third novel, Eucalyptus, a middle-aged man returns to his homeland for his father’s funeral. This, in and of itself, does not make for a unique narrative: countless books, films, and songs have forged similar paths. But what’s arresting about Segura’s vision of this well-worn trope is that he undermines the expected—the revelation of past discretions, the outsider element of “the arrival” after time away—to remark on far greater themes of identity and place. As the slender volume shuttles along with breathtaking execution, eventually taking the form of an existential whodunit, one gleans that Segura isn’t quite interested in “you can’t go home again” platitudes. Rather, he finds fascination in more oblique questions: What is home? Who truly belongs to a parcel of land? And it is these queries that make Eucalyptus an adventurous, hypnotic read.

Alberto Ventura, the novel’s protagonist, is a character not unlike Segura: a Chilean writer who, as a child, migrated to Canada with his family after the 1973 coup-d’état, avoiding the long and violent Pinochet régime. As the narrative opens, Alberto and his young son, Marco, travel from Montreal to Temuco in southern Chile to bury Alberto’s father, the bombastic Roberto, a former political force and current farmer of eucalyptus trees, whose passing comes as an unexpected shock. Over several whirlwind days, Alberto—who remained in Canada after his parents and brother returned to Chile in 1990—is greeted by family and friends and is educated on his father’s shadowy final years: his murder of a young indigenous employee, his love affair with the daughter of an indigenous chief, his separation from those he once loved, his flashbacks to his brief time in prison during the coup. And as Roberto’s history unravels, through declarations both remorseful and bitter, distraught and frustrated, Alberto questions the nature of the man’s passing. Though theoretically killed by an untreated internal hemorrhage, after Alberto discovers a long, puzzling scar on Roberto’s body—“like a snake, zigzagging from waist to chest” (63)—he is convinced that treachery is afoot.

Armed with nothing but his own convictions (“Why waste your time looking into the death of a man who spent his whole life humiliating you?” his uncle Pedro asks at one point [108]), Alberto strikes out to cull information on his father, and as he ping-pongs from homes to police stations to Roberto’s abandoned compound, Segura’s writing adopts strong cinematic elements that spark a narrative rhythm. Here, recollections of characters seamlessly segue, à la a film dissolve, into representative scenes: we hear Roberto’s business partner recollect a moment, for example, only to then submerge into that moment, seeing the world as Roberto sees it, hearing his voice as he speaks. These transitions occur regularly, one or two per chapter, and create a strong structure for Alberto to explore. They are also quietly understated, luring the reader and resulting in a ghostlike journey: passing through bodies, into minds, and then back again. And as Alberto assembles these memories, he is forced to decide which version of his father is genuine. Is he the brute? The egomaniac? The quiet hero? Does it matter?

Thematically, Segura patterns Eucalyptus with constant nods to the idea of invasion and to the fragility of the place one calls home. These themes provide not only additional narrative rhythm, but they also elevate the story, convincing the attentive reader that learning the cause of Roberto’s death is far less important than the exploration of what we all consider ownership. The argument is introduced on page one. Alberto, driving into southern Chile, passes over a bridge:

That’s it, he thought, I’m here. He lowered the window to savour the elusive, vaguely clinical odour of the eucalyptus bordering the Pan-American Highway, and told himself that even his knowledge of the southern flora, he owed to his father. (1)

Not only does Segura deliver Alberto, the stranger, to Chile in these opening lines, but he also offers here the first taste of the eucalyptus, a non-native tree. Farmed on large plantations by Roberto, the eucalyptus peppers the remainder of the manuscript and becomes an analogy for invasiveness and destruction as the novel progresses. “This tree, with its phenomenal growth and undeniable qualities, has…done irreparable damage in some parts of the region,” Alberto is told (130), yet these charges also pervade the thoughts of those Alberto encounters: to some, Roberto has destroyed; to the indigenous Mapuche, Alberto’s entire family is part of the problem. Relationships between Roberto and the Mapuche fluctuate wildly. And while Alberto himself feels misplaced throughout Eucalyptus, paranoid of his foreignness, of his own impact, he recalls his own family lineage, the ancestors who arrived in Chile after a long journey from Andalusia. The Ventura name, like the eucalyptus tree, settled in this country for reasons of prosperity.

And yet, towering over all of Segura’s characters is the Llaima Volcano, the true possessor of Chile. An omnipresent hulk ready to wipe the slate clean, Segura employs Llaima to, again, continue the thread of place and invasion: the volcano threatens to erupt and swallow the region, rendering moot all of the questions provoked by Alberto’s quest. Llaima even taunts Alberto at one point, as Segura writes:

And so Alberto feasted his eyes, as his father had so often done, on the dramatic glow of the sunset, and when he raised them he saw (God in heaven, was he hallucinating?) Lliama emitting a delicate wisp of grey smoke in the form of a question mark. (112)

In this moment, it is as if the gods are looking down on Alberto with not a beacon of hope, but with a shrug. And conceivably that’s the ultimate goal of Segura’s Eucalyptus, for while the case of Roberto’s peculiar death, stuffed with contradictions and unusual characters, spryly marches forward, there is a certain sense, by novel’s end, that the real mystery to be solved skews closer to the experiential: why we end up in the lives we live.

Benjamin Woodard

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Ben_WoodardBenjamin Woodard lives in Connecticut. His recent fiction has appeared in decomP magazinE, Cleaver Magazine, and Numéro Cinq. His reviews and interviews have been featured in Numéro Cinq, Publishers Weekly, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and other fine publications. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. You can find him at benjaminjwoodard.com and on Twitter.

Mar 272012
 

For you delectation and inspiration, here are the opening paragraphs of my essay “Pedro the Uncanny: A Note on Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Parámo” excerpted from my new book Attack of the Copula Spiders on the Biblioasis International Translation Series. Pedro Parámo is an amazing novel, written about dead people from the point of view of a dead man. Rulfo based the structure on the idea of a cemetery in which the various grave occupants spend their time whispering to one another, an eerie and startling conception. Critics often all this book the first instance of Latin American Magic Realism. It’s a Mexican classic. Click on the link above to go to the Biblioasis site and read the rest of the essay.

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