Roncagliolo’s Red April could be the New Black

“Abril Rojo”, by Santiago Roncagliolo; Ed. Alfaguara, 2006

A few weeks ago, during an open interview at the Book Fair, Hanif Kureishi was asked the eternal question for any writer visiting Argentina: what his opinion of Jorge Luis Borges was. He reminisced on his days as an aspiring writer on a steady diet of Penguin paperbacks, among which were “translations of all those magical realist writers who provided such a stark contrast to the bleak English weather”.

As much (or as little) as Kureishi was aware of our Blind Not-magical-realist Bard, his confusion is one of the side effects of the Latin American “Boom” of the 1960s: Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa found an exotic literary voice which appealed to the European imagination and redefined the way in which Latin America was to be represented in writing. Rulfo’s Comala, García Marquez’s Macondo, and Vargas Llosa’s sensuous forays into the absurd set a standard many lesser writers were more than eager to hide behind (Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel, to name but two), and to which some worthy writers chose to submit (Haroldo Conti’s Mascaró, el cazador americano is an example of a writer losing his voice trying to “tune in” to Magic America). Editors and European readers still yearn for these exotic lands, and Latin American narrators still find it hard to break into the international arena with a different formula – how can you be from Latin America and not be a magical realist? There have been many hyped attempts at finding a “new boom” (Chilean young writers of the 90s, for instance), but in the end they have fizzled down to names rather than a movement – just as the original Boom was made up of writers who were quite different from each other, and yet were perceived as a unit. It makes sense that a writer like Borges registers as a García Marquez knockoff for Kureishi.

Santiago Roncagliolo has won the US$175,000 Premio Alfaguara de novela 2006 with his fourth book, Abril rojo (Alfaguara), which restyles the Latin American myth into a “magical realism for the XXI century”: terrorism, mysticism, the ever-present death, the sinister clutches of a corrupt political power, perversity, dialects and colourful details by the ton, ordinary characters in extraordinary circumstances. Como agua para chocolate meets Seven. The Godfather meets Diarios de motocicleta. Pedro Páramo meets The Maltese Falcon. And yet, there is something missing to make this blend of liquors a signature cocktail.

The novel takes place in the year 2000, under the government of Alberto Fujimori, once the “war” to quell the Shining Path uprising is officially over. Deputy district attorney Félix Chacaltana Saldívar, an insignificant piece in the judiciary system of an insignificant Peruvian town, handles a murder case for the first time. He starts as a naïve staunch believer in the letter of the law, and step by step muddles into a quagmire of corruption and deceit that reveals the power relationships between the army, the police, limeño political power and their collective efforts to hide the fact that the Shining Path is far from being a memory and that their own “war” deeds were nothing but institutionalized slaughter. The first murder turns into a series of brutal mutilations, and that in turn blends with the development of the Easter celebrations. There is the customary love interest (with a twist), and the story precipitates into a tale of mysticism, gore, murder investigations and a variant of the bildungrsoman (all of them, too, with a twist).

“I always wanted to write a thriller,” says Roncagliolo in the blurb, and that he did: this novel goes through the motions of a thriller at the right pace. The writing is precise and rarely gets in the way (some scenes and characters are a bit shy of a success, and there is more than a fair share of “observations” from the narrative voice, but that does not mar the effectiveness), and the plot is tight and sinuous.

Roncagliolo’s approach to the police story evokes hard-boiled detective stories set in the years of the Argentine military dictatorship (Osvaldo Soriano, Vicente Battista’s Sucesos argentinos, Manuel Vásquez Montalbán’s El quinteto de Buenos Aires) in that the genre provides a narrative form for a tale of corrupt power. But the porteño gloom is replaced by a veneer of the exotic, even esoteric, and the story takes a Hollywoodesque look-and-feel when it dwells on cinematic descriptions and some excesses of “local colour”.

A few months before Roncagliolo bagged the Premio Alfaguara, another Peruvian writer, Alonso Cueto, had grabbed the Premio Herralde 2005 with La hora azul (Anagrama), also set in the aftermath of the “war” against the Shining Path. It seems more than a coincidence that the same Latin American topic should dominate two major Spanish literary awards: does the industry reckons it has struck a vein in its quest for a new boom? Is the Shining Path novel The New Black?

(publicado en el suplemento On Sunday del Buenos Aires Herald)