One of the Colombian novels that I purchased to help acculturate me was The Armies by Evelio Rosero. It won the Tusquets International Novel Prize in Guadalajara, Mexico but nothing from me.
While the pace of the story made it a book I was able to quickly pick up and put down, I found a number of its literary qualities not to be to my taste. Interesting, yes, and I’m glad to have read it – but besides the few long descriptions of unimportant things that I found broke up the story’s pacing, the plot needed more to make it more engaging to my taste.
The story, in short, is of a perverted old school director named Ismael whose life of spying on the much younger female neighbor who enjoys sunbathing nude and being generally skeevy to the local female population is interrupted by armed forces – paras, guerillas and the army – coming to his town and killing and kidnapping several people including, we learn at the end, his wife.
This isn’t the first time such kidnappings and violence has it’s happened. In fact, it’s become an annual tradition for one of the widowed wives to put on a party on the day of her husband’s capture. But since this is happening at a time that Ismael is starting to feel the effects of his 70 plus years, his quest to ameliorate new health concerns causes him to avert meeting some and to encourage him to meet others outside his daily routine. This, along with the eventual realization that his wife is not coming back, gives him a new attitude toward death that causes him to stop caring for his appearance and informs his decisions in dealing with the aftermath of the battle in San Juan – such as picking up and throwing away a live grenade that hadn’t detonated outside the front door that he had “forgot about for weeks”.
Juan Gabriel Vasquez writes about the book in the following way: “The Armies has done what Colombian literature has been trying to do for decades: to chronicle the conflict without jingoism, sentimentalism, or empty rhetoric.” This to me, however, is its greatest weakness as a work of literature. Jingoism and sentimentalism are the organizing principles of the antagonists of the book – and their occlusion to focus on the age and trauma-induced perspective of the elderly Ismael strikes me as an opportunity missed.
Paras, Guerillas, and the Military are all described as having little to no regard for human life – the captain of the military is described shooting civilians in a moment of anger while his troops drug, rape, and assault others while; the guerillas gruesomely decapitate a collaborator and his dog in a way that is meant to highlight their inhumanity.
While the story itself is generally engaging – I find that in contrast to a work like Dona Barbara, which clearly uses the characters in the book to signify archetypes in the Venezuelan llanos and region immediately outside of it – Rosero constructs all his characters as individuals. This itself isn’t blameworthy, but I feel that so much is potentially lost.
As a voyeur and former teacher that appears to know everyone in San Jose, one would expect to have some sort of strong thoughts or opinions about the armed forces which occupy his town and disrupt his life, however he expresses largely only fear and helplessness. The principles behind the motive for violence – to support the state, to contest the state, to achieve bumper profits without the state’s interference – are never reflection upon.
I believe that all this that I perceive as a dearth in Roserio’s work is also a condition of the audience in Colombia as well as taboos limiting political speech rather than aesthetic neglect. In this way the work takes on a different significance other than a novel that missed some opportunities for interesting speech – it becomes an indicator of the type of worldview propagated by those forces limiting potential literary-aesthetic constructions. I this way the book becomes fascinating and the almost hallucinatory trance that Ismael enters into towards the end is indicative of the horror of “magical realism” as living conditions under which one must live and the tensions involved in choosing a political position.