“The so-called non-fiction can distort: the facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.
This was stated by VS Naipaul, the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature, when discussing his trade. It is true that Sir Vidia was fond of intellectual provocation, but in this, so central to the task of a great novelist and unsurpassed professional observer of the Third World, I do not think he was joking. I immediately thought of his proverb as soon as I finished reading—for the second time in a matter of weeks—the novel back to when (Siruela), by the Venezuelan María Elena Morán. The title already speaks of the irresistible poetic intuition with which the author won the 2022 edition of the consecratory Café Gijón Novel Prize in Madrid.
Its argument can be stated briefly, but not the supreme wizardry put into its composition. Morán was born in Maracaibo in 1985 and is a highly-skilled screenwriter—a film, whose script she co-authored, will be shown this year in Cannes. Her exceptional mastery of dramatic writing deltaically irrigates all the chapters of her novel.
One day, at the end of the last decade, Nina leaves Maracaibo, her hometown, and in search of a better destination she crosses the border of Brazil. She leaves Elisa, her pre-adolescent daughter, in the care of Graciela, her mother. Graciela has recently been widowed and is coping badly with grief in the midst of the catastrophe of the country’s electrical grid that, on one memorable occasion, left the entire country without electricity—refrigerators, operating rooms, bioanalysis laboratories, medical rooms, neonates, subway lines, public offices—, for weeks on end.
Separating from your daughter while you emigrate in search of a job that allows you to have her with you and give her a decent life and a good education does not imply, of course, heartless abandonment. It is the circumstance of many single emigrants who face untold hardships, exposed to xenophobia. The reception camp in Brazil is burned down by xenophobic locals.
“If Elisa were with her, maybe it would be easier,” Nina thinks, “but […] it would have to be a girl with the seal of contempt”. She prefers not to drag her daughter into the abandonment of emigration for now. Nina and Camilo, the girl’s father, have been fervent Chavismo activists whose commitment to the Bolivarian revolution deepened, precisely, in the tumultuous years that preceded the death of the “Eternal Commander.”
Camilo has become, still young, part of the high Chavista civil service in charge of social plans. Camilo is a living interface between the State and the crowd of the excluded and the vulnerable. Nina and Camilo have separated, with some trepidation, shortly before Chávez’s death, in 2013. In this, without a doubt, lies the daring singularity of this novel that transmutes a part—only a part—of the experience in great style. author’s staff.
One of the most exhilarating passages due to his mastery in narrating it states that between Camilo and Nina, who already lives in a double disappointment, what Valle-Inclán would have called a “cowardly reconciliation” and short-lived occurs. The trigger for the reunion is the spectacular funeral services for Hugo Chávez.
The literary language of Morán is enjoyed at times in the idioms and endings of the speech of his homeland, Maracaibo, where you see as in Antioquia or Managua or Buenos Aires. With this, he achieves an extraordinary narrative fluidity. The parla of the left and the Marxist Vulgate are the object of his irony but no less than the classist litanies of our right. The emotional insight that Morán dedicates to the three women in this story is moving. But it is in the examination of his male characters that the sharpness of her gaze provides the most captivating part of his writing. My favorite is a coyote named Perro that operates on the US-Mexico border.
With Camilo, Morán has rounded off an idiosyncratic exemplar of what, for lack of another expression, I will call “Latin American left-wing masculinity, after Seattle.” He is not a caricature, he is the personoid of an authoritarian and manipulative archetype who falls out of favor with the regime in an internal struggle.
He then has the idea of kidnapping Elisa and taking her illegally, with flattery and promises, to the United States! Where else do the ex-Chavistas go? Camilo hopes that the kidnapping paves the way for a marital reconciliation: “We will be three or we will be nothing,” says the former comrade. There, in Houston, live his wealthy parents whom he parasitizes.
Nina’s reaction, herself an impecunious former Chavista in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, is, naturally, to fight for custody of her daughter. I will not incur a spoiler of what follows but do not fear the reader: María Elena Morán does not provide us with a Kramer against Chavista Kramer but one of the best novels about the political disenchantment in our region, written with much more than mere solvency, for a young novelist of our time.
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