Great expectations unfulfilled

La Patria, Federico Jeanmaire, Seix Barral, 2006

Many years later, across the corridor from his son’s room, a middle-aged man sits down to write about his European exile between 1979 and 1982. Spellbound, he cannot stop writing until both the night and his tale come to an end.

Federico Jeanmaire’s La patria boils down to these two sentences, and the reader would have been spared a lot if this had been all. This cliché structure for a hindsight bildungsroman (especially whem combined with the myth of “the European experience”) usually acts as a foil for a narrative which is supposed to provide a backbone for the novel, but not here. Instead, the narrator is fixated on the notions of freedom and fatherland, and chooses to ponder on them loftily for the length of the novel with a few anecdotes tossed in for a bit of variety. The anecdotes repeat the fixation theme in two flavours: the memory of the many times a gipsy told him of the origins of his people (the legend changes every time, mercifully for the reader) and the ways in which several European women could not resist the charms of this freewheeling Casanova in exile, leading to a relationship with a Dutch woman which dominates the second half of the book. There is the mandatory hippiesque tour around Europe, the customary succession of cities and makeshift occupations, the fleeting drug episode, the predictable reflections on Argentina from Europe, and the anticipated return (returns, in fact, as there are two of them) to the fatherland.

But behind, before, above, between and below this trite formula for the exiled road movie are the endless musings and reflections which, the narrator believes, articulate the book. The result is storytelling that does not tell a story, reflections which do not reflect and conclusions that do not conclude. This novel’s claim is that autobiographical writing (real or makebelieve) is at its best when it shares the chaos of experience and mimics the self-centered maelstroms of the mind, and that writing does not need to explain or justify itself and can do nothing better than reflect on its own making and existence. Unfortunately, this theory of literature does not gel into a cohesive whole, and the reader is left with a pretentious work that is partly a book of personal mementos, partly a chaotic reality show and partly an attempt at an essay, finding neither a resolution as any of these three nor a path to call its own.

The fact that the narrator discovers a literary calling and spends the second half of the book musing on it and moving towards it is of very little help to the cause. This is the moment when an obsessive narrator becomes the protagonist of self-obsessed literature (even self serving, if the work is to be seen as autobiographical): this plot thread adds the clichés of the writing-about-writers-becoming-writers subgenre, and twists the story into unrealistic narrative knots while burdening it with yet another generous serving of lofty musings.

The writing itself is inconsistent, hovering between different kinds of vernacular (porteño vocabulary at times, Castillian on occasions, even sparkles of Central American) and hammering on certain phrases as if the secret of narrative rhythm lied in using the same five sentences to write an entire page.

On the whole, this novel digs its own grave by setting such high standards on itself: if the reader were not reminded on every single paragraph of the importance of the mission the narrator is undertaking both in his European exile and in his retelling of it, or of the loftiness and confusion of his ideas, the weaknesses of the novel would be forgivable or understandable. On page 207, the last sentences of the book read “A difficult thing, freedom. Almost impossible to write”. La patria cannot soar beyond the “almost impossible” and yet blows its own horns time and time again as if it had truly mastered the taskand therefore fails, making these last words its most fitting epitaph.

(Publicado en el suplemento On Sunday, del Buenos Aires Herald)