Thursday 9 April 2020

Andrés Barba's "A Luminous Republic"


 

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.

HardcoverUK edition208 pages
Expected publication: June 4th 2020 by Granta Books (first published November 29th 2017) 
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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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