A Luminous Republic
by Andrés Barba (translated by Lisa Dillman)
A review
Edmund White, introducing Lisa Dillman’s
English translation of República Luminosa on Granta Books, describes
Andrés Barba’s novel as “Lord of the Flies meets Heart of Darkness”,
whilst admitting that this is how a Hollywood hack would pitch it and that it
gives only “the crudest suggestion of this miraculous book”. Juan Gabriel Vásquez considers it as “Lord
of the Flies seen from the other side” but is quick to add that this “would
rob Barba of the profound originality of his world”.
What leads these respected authors to describe
this novel in these ecstatic terms? Let’s start with the easy part, that is,
the comparison to Lord of the Flies. There
is, indeed, a vague similarity between the premise of Barba’s novel and
Golding’s work. A Luminous Republic is
set in San Cristóbal, a (fictional) tropical city in Argentina bordered by a
river and a jungle. The residents of the
city are used to seeing poor, indigenous children around, a symbol of the
uneasy conviviality between the urban settlers and its three thousand Ňeê
inhabitants. However, in 1994, the town
dwellers notice a new phenomenon.
Thirty-two feral children descend on the city. These vagrants are not Ňeê, nor is it ever
clear from where they’re coming from. They seem to stick together,
communicating in an indecipherable language.
At first, the thirty-two are little more than a nuisance. Then, they attack a supermarket, killing two
adults in the process. Terror mounts
when the adults realise that the thirty-two exert some sort of psychological
influence over the other children of San Cristóbal, casting a cloud of
suspicion on all young people of the town.
The narrator of A Luminous Republic is a
social worker who, two decades after the events, recounts the so-called
“altercations” between the children and the inhabitants of San Cristobál and
the manhunt mounted to catch them. One
of the intriguing characteristics of the novel is that it shows us as much
about this flawed narrator as it does about the events described. Not unlike District Prosecutor Chacaltana in
Roncagliolo’s Red April, the narrator adopts a formal “civil servant” style
in his account, sprinkling his ‘factual’ report with references to newspaper
articles, documentaries, and learned studies.
We realise, however, that he had a central role in the events in
question and participated in some of the dubious decisions taken at the time,
and so he is hardly the unbiased reporter he makes himself out to be. His ruminations about these dark events are
also linked to his relationship with his wife Maia (who, unlike him, is a Ňeê),
and her daughter from a previous marriage, also called Maia, whom he refers to
as “the girl”. In the “altercations”
between the thirty-two and the San Cristobálians there runs throughout a sense
of “us and them”. There is the same
diffidence between the narrator and his wife. Despite the love he feels for
her, there are parts of her which remain elusive. His attempts to get to the
bottom of the mystery of the thirty-two mirror his attempt to understand his
companion.
White considers A Luminous Republic as
an epic novel. At just 200 pages or so “it can be
read in one evening” but it feels as “full” as if it were a “1000 page novel”.
I would say, rather, that it feels as if it were several novels rolled into
one. It’s a weird tale, a piece of
speculative (supernatural? magical realist?) fiction, a Gothic fantasy, an
adventure story, but also a philosophical fable which explores (and explodes)
prevalent ideas about the innocence of childhood and asks pertinent questions
about the demarcation good and evil.
What I found particularly surprising is that
despite the “formal” tone which the narrator tends to adopt, there are passages
of striking visual beauty. We get a
taste of this from the very first pages, when we first glimpse San Cristóbal,
with its colours “flat, vital and insanely bright: the jungle’s intense
green… the earth’s brilliant red, the blue sky so dazzling it forced you into a
constant squint, the dense brown of the river Eré extending four kilometres
shore to shore…” But this becomes most evident in the novel’s conclusion –
when we can finally understand what the “luminous republic” of the title refers
to. These passages have haunting poetry
which will remain with me for a long time.
Hardcover, UK edition, 208 pages
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The narrator’s wife is a violinist and a music
teacher and has her own string trio. In
the course of the novel some pieces of music are explicitly mentioned. Maybe it is mistaken to read too much in the
particular choices. However, they’re a good start for a brief playlist of
pieces to accompany this review.
In one scene, the narrator catches a group of
three of the vagrant children who have gatecrashed a concert organised by
Maia. The piece which is being played is
Giuseppe Tartini’s The Devil’s Trill Sonata, allegedly inspired by a
dream in which the composer sold his soul in return for musical skills:
One night, in the
year 1713 I dreamed I had made a pact with the devil for my soul. Everything
went as I wished: my new servant anticipated my every desire. Among other
things, I gave him my violin to see if he could play. How great was my
astonishment on hearing a sonata so wonderful and so beautiful, played with
such great art and intelligence, as I had never even conceived in my boldest flights
of fantasy. I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted: my breath failed me, and
I awoke. I immediately grasped my violin in order to retain, in part at least,
the impression of my dream. In vain! The music which I at this time composed is
indeed the best that I ever wrote, and I still call it the "Devil's
Trill", but the difference between it and that which so moved me is so
great that I would have destroyed my instrument and have said farewell to music
forever if it had been possible for me to live without the enjoyment it affords
me.
Here is a performance of this piece performed
by Ray Chen and the Amsterdam Sinfonietta.
At another point, Maia is rehearsing Jean
Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, with scant success.
Violinist Ray Chen is once again the soloist in this performance of the
Concerto:
Nothing could be further from the heat of the
tropics than the music of the Finnish composer, which is so often compared to
the cool, bleak landscapes of the North.
It is a point which the narrator makes elsewhere – suggesting that despite Maia being an accomplished
performed of “classical music” it remains a foreign language to her, unlike the
rhythms of the folk music which runs in her blood:
What had for years struck me as an amusing
contradiction in my wife’s character – that she should devote herself to
classical music yet only consider “real” the kind she could dance to – became
perfectly comprehensible to me then.
Classical music did not possess (either for her or for anyone else
attending their concerts) the quality of music so much as that of
stagnation. It was composed according to
criteria too distant and by minds too different for this to be any other way,
but that didn’t make the audience unsusceptible to its influence. When Maia played those pieces, they wore the
same concentrated expressions they’d have worn while listening to a foreign
language, one that was particularly seductive yet nonetheless incomprehensible …
For Maia, classical music was something that took place only in the brain,
while other types of music – cumbia, salsa, merengue – did so in the body, in
the stomach.
Of course, this all chimes in with the novel’s
theme of the difficulty (if not impossibility) of communication between
different communities with their different cultures and languages. This is not to say, however, that there
haven’t been composers who have tried to marry the forms of “classical” music
with folk and popular rhythms and melodies.
Given that the novel is set in
Argentina (albeit a fictional part of it), I thought I’d start with some music
of Alberto Ginastera (1916 - 1983), one of the leading Latin American composers of
“classical” music of the 20th Century. Ginastera’s language went through different
phases throughout his career but, throughout, he was inspired by Argentinian
folk themes and, particularly, the Gaucho tradition. Here are the dances from his ballet Estancia
– hardly “stagnant music”.
Another Latin-American (albeit Brazilian) composer who sought to combine classical music and indigenous traditions is Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887 - 1959). His Bachianas Brasileiras combine Brazilian folk and
popular music and Baroque idioms, hence the tribute to Johann Sebastian Bach in
their titles. The Tocata from the second set of Bachianas, describe a small train making its way through the Brazilian jungle.
What better way to end a playlist inspired by a
novel set in Argentina than with some Argentinian tango. Virtuoso bandoneon player and composer Astor
Piazzolla (1921 - 1992) gave his own spin to the traditional tango by creating a new style
known as nuevo tango incorporating elements from jazz and classical
music. In a tribute to Maia’s trio of
string players, here’s Piazzolla’s Esqualo arranged for string trio. Is
this a language which Maia would understand?
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