A Luminous Republic – The Stunning Strangeness & Marvel of Barba’s World

For children, the world is a museum in which the adult guardians might be loving most of the time, but that doesn’t stop them from imposing rules: everything there is solid, everything has always already existed, long before them. In exchange for love, the children are required to uphold the myth of their innocence. Not only do they have to be innocent, they have to perform it. 

In Such Small Hands, Spanish writer Andres Barba delves into the unsettling, hyper-real world of a girl-child as she attempts to come to terms with her trauma. With A Luminous Republic (published April 20 & translated to English by Lisa Dillman), Barba explores the depths of human soul and the truths about childhood through a enigmatic tale of feral children. Narrated by a lulling yet a detached unnamed narrator, A Luminous Republic is set in a fictional Argentinean city of San Cristobal. Our narrator recounts the strange events of 1995, who is sent to San Cristobal by the social services department to develop a social integration programme for indigenous communities.

The narrator recalls moving to the city in April 1993 with his music teacher wife Maia and her daughter, also named Maia, whom our narrator simply addresses as ‘The Girl’. San Cristobal is Maia’s native place. In the early portion of the novel, the narrator, a total outsider, concisely sketches the portrait of the city – its river, the vast jungle, the marginalization of Nee Indians, etc. The narration is filled with the dichotomies, especially in the contrast he sees between the order of city and the anarchy of jungle. Yet it is not the Nee community that’s labeled ‘the other’ or bands together to disrupt our narrator’s efforts for ‘social integration’.

What unsettles the San Cristobalites is the arrival of thirty-two mendicant children of both sexes, aged between nine and thirteen, and speaking a strange language. The narrator discusses various theories related to the children’s identity, but they remain elusive figures till the end. Initially, the children scavenge in groups and commit minor thefts. When the children’s mischief offends the San Cristobal adults, they decide to take drastic actions. And the turmoil gradually leads to 1995 Dakota Supermarket incident, culminating in a savage attack as the pack of gutter kids kills two and grievously injures three.

The city’s inhabitants, feeling besieged, sets out to apprehend the little marauders, but they all disappear into the jungle. Soon, the Dakota event becomes a national sensation as it captures the imagination of media, academicians, and the general public. The mystery behind the thirty-two’s origin and disappearance deeply impacts the psyche of San Cristobalites that soon the city’s children vanish into the jungle to join the young fugitives. Hyperbolized by fairy-tales and uncanny theories, the thirty-two’s alleged viciousness and power over the San Critstobalites extends beyond the sum of their actions. It all leads to more violence and deaths. Moreover, the fate of the thirty-two is made clear in the slim novel’s first sentence: “When I’m asked about the thirty-two children who lost their lives in San Cristóbal, my response varies depending on the age of my interlocutor.”

Named as the Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists by Granta magazine, Andres Barba's simple prose relies on evocative and rich aphorisms. The narrator telling the events, with the benefit of hindsight, imparts a philosophical depth to emotions and actions (“Love and fear have one thing in common: they are both states in which we allow ourselves to be fooled and guided, we entrust another person to control our beliefs and, what’s more, our destiny”). Mr. Barba is not interested in creating conflicts or sustaining expectations. By attuning the story in the post-truth context, the author offers the choice to get lost in the narrator’s metaphors-filled world which eventually bestows a strange allegorical dimension to the behavior of ‘bad-seed’ children.

Two things about the thirty-two unsettle the narrator and the San Cristobal people: the lack of hierarchy and the language they speak. Both corroborate the ‘otherness’ of the children. The dichotomy pushes us to draw our own allegories equating the anxieties of adult society with the capitalist structure while the thirty-two representing the anarchy as well as the beauty of an alternate society. Beneath the stoicism and violence of the thirty-two, there seems to be space for lyricism in their divergence, closely glimpsed in the literal subterranean walk during the novel’s final chapters. Even without striving to pluck out allegories from the story, A Luminous Republic deftly explores fascinating themes such as humanity’s penchant for violence, the innocence myth of childhood, and social conformity. It’s a tale of social destabilization that sounds more eerie and haunting in the wake of the pandemic.

The Graveyard Apartment – An Entertainingly Macabre Tale of a Haunted Housing Complex

When human beings are deprived of their normal freedom of movement, they need to latch onto any shred of hope. As long as there is some action to take or some solution to explore, even if those options ultimately come to naught, the mere illusion of possibility can keep people from tumbling into the abyss of despair.

Though I tend to read a lot of horror, I am nowadays tired of delving into the conventional ‘scary’ read. So I was wary about Mariko Koike’s The Graveyard Apartment which occupied a place in numerous lists referring to horror fiction in translation. The set-up as the title implies is very basic and familiar: a young family of three moves into a new apartment complex in Tokyo, which overlooks an ancient graveyard and situated next to a crematorium, and a Buddhist temple. Validating our expectations of an allegedly haunted place, things start going south with ceaseless occurrences of chilling unexplainable phenomena.

Horror fiction always makes a big thing about living near cemeteries. It makes an assumption that condos closer to graveyard won’t sell at all. Residential locations lying adjacent to cemetery are a common thing and people living there aren’t saddled with ‘spooky’ episodes. But if you could accept such presumptions or narrative underpinnings and picture in your mind the supposed spookiness of an old graveyard, this one would be a grimly fascinating and a leisurely read. What I liked about Graveyard Apartment is its slow-burn tone with a penchant for building psychological chills. Furthermore, I liked Koike’s decision to avoid explanations regarding the motivations of the demonic entities.

Originally published in 1986 (and translated to English by Deborah Boliver Boehm), Mariko Koike’s novel is set in 1987. The book opens with the death of Kano family’s pet finch. They dismiss it as bad luck, but having read numerous horror novels we know it’s just the first in a series of eerie occurrences. Husband Teppei is happy to own an apartment in the middle of Tokyo and closer to his office (an advertising firm), provided if they can perceive the graveyard as just a community park of sorts. Wife Misao has some reservations about the place but she is rejoiced to have a friendly neighbor of same age. Once their five-year old daughter Tamao is enrolled in the kindergarten, Misao is also hoping to start working from home.

Though Teppei and Misao looks like a ‘normal’ couple we gradually get to discern the skeletons in their closet. The guilt they carry over due to a grim event in the shared past show that the psychic wounds may open up if a boiling point is reached. The sparsely populated eight-storey Central Plaza Mansion with a sprawling basement space also withholds a supposedly darker past. Misao hears about a abandoned underground shopping plaza project. In fact, the only remainder about the shelved construction project is an underground road that runs through the graveyard into the building’s basement. Hence the terror starts unfolding from the basement which also comes with a structural flaw that doubles up as the perfect horror story-trope, i.e., the basement is only accessible by the elevator which breaks down at the most inopportune moments.

Despite the tad cliched escalation of haunting tactics (commencing with pet’s death and moving to dark figures in TV), Graveyard Apartment largely works due to the dynamics between Misao, Teppei, and Tamao. And the tension between the couple when subjected to supernatural occurrences is also organically developed. Moreover, the dark secret of the past plays a pivotal role in coloring the two central characters’ perceptions. The novel falters a bit in the middle and some of its elements do seem to have got lost in the translation. Yet the pacing and scary quotient picks up very well in the last-third.

Koike, mostly known for detective fiction, does a wonderful job in establishing the atmosphere of dread and high anxiety through suggestive horror. Eventually, we are left with an unsettling climax with no answers which I found to be immensely gratifying although the same may come across as disappointing for many horror fiction readers.  Overall, The Graveyard Apartment starts off as a typical poltergeist story but gets better due to its sufficiently creepy atmosphere and ambiguous horror elements.

Such Small Hands – A Terrifyingly Subliminal Tale of Trauma and Abandonment

“…We ambled awkwardly alongside Marina’s memory, always parallel, always tired, always hungry, but the urgency of our desire wasn’t enough to bring it to life and then we tired of trying, and desire turned to rage against that girl who seemed too old…

Last year when I read Argentinean author Samantha Schweblin’s novella Fever Dream I was haunted for days by its eerie, foreboding mood & the images and questions it evoked. It’s a surrealistic tale that’s part political & eco critique and part intimate study of broken souls. I am still at a loss of words to describe the feeling this unconventional yet dazzling short novel kindled within me which was exemplarily translated by Megan McDowell. Spanish author Andres Barba’s 2008 novella Such Small Hands also withholds such ferocious intensity, its perplexing tone mesmerizingly translated by Lisa Dillman. Such Small Hands is a journey into the creepy and incredibly complex inner world of orphaned children. Barba dismantles the typical societal notions of childhood innocence and purity to showcase how callousness and grim curiosity are also part of a child’s world, which is firmly rooted inside the traumatized and isolated kids characters of Barba.

Both Fever Dream and Such Small Hands take a genre story and make it a chilling experiment in literary form.  Edmund White in the afterword of Such Small Hands befittingly writes, “Every once in a while a novel does not record reality but creates a whole new reality, one that casts a light on our darkest feelings.” The novella pulls us into its grimly fascinating world through its focus on the minutiae and in the manner Barba inventively discerns the coarser emotions of traumatized children. On the outset, Such Small Hands tells a very simple tale of a seven-year old Marina who ends in an orphanage after suddenly losing her parents in an automobile accident. When Marina enters the orphanage, clutching her only source of comfort – a toy doll – she immediately becomes both an object of intrigue and an outcast.

Divided into three parts, each small chapters alternates between the perspective of Marina and the voice of other girls who all speak as one. Trapped in the claustrophobic world of orphaned children, we the readers become a doll as the children susurrate their darker inner most thoughts that forebode a tragic conclusion. When Marina realizes that she is ‘different’ (from the scar across the midriff to her quiet defiance while carrying out a hunger strike, Marina is doomed to not be a part of the ‘collective’) she seeks to wrest control from her tormentors by teaching them a game. Under Barba’s pristinely arranged prose, the intention and results profoundly unsettles us.

The overall events in Such Small Hands is said to be based on a chilling real-life incident that took place in Brazil in the 1960s. Girls in an orphanage at Rio de Janeiro killed a child and played with her body parts for a week. In the interview to Granta, Barba states that this episode had a powerful impact on him, “not because it is particularly sinister but because it seems to hide in its interior a story of love and fascination.” Consequently, Barba isn’t trying to chronicle the grim tale of killer kids, but deploys the written word to create a powerful mood and accesses the unconscious mind in a way that’s extremely complex and yet flows smoothly.  

Such Small Hands and Fever Dream (and I’m on the hunt for similar novellas) clearly can’t be reduced to its plot points. Its atmospheric creepiness can only be felt; the depiction of unforeseeable cruelties in a mundane reality which sets out to violently infiltrate our subconscious. As I mentioned earlier, Barba’s fascination with minutiae leads to grotesque as well as magical images. For instance, the trail of words used to describe the portentous act of severing the caterpillar which is juxtaposed with Marina talking to her psychologist. It remains as a testament to Barba’s power to transport us to unseen, darker dimensions within the everyday normality (which brings to mind the adjective ‘Lynchian’).

Overall, Such Small Hands is fiction at its most formidable and compelling. It explores beauty, vileness, pandemonium, and the complexities of violence existing at the various levels of seemingly simple world of children.

Ways of Going Home – A Sumptuously Layered Poetic Reflection on Memory and History

"That’s what we grew up believing, that the novel belonged to our parents We cursed them, and also took refuge in their shadows relieved. While the adults killed or were killed, we drew pictures in a corner. While the country was falling to pieces, we were learning to talk, to walk, to fold napkins in the shape of boats, of airplanes. While the novel was happening, we played hide-and-seek, we played at disappearing."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes are some of the great Latin American novelists who depicted the region’s historical trauma in its totality. Chilean novelist Alejandro Zambra’s slender yet beautifully structured Ways of Going Home (published in 2011 and translated to English by Megan McDowell) is an opposite to those books. Zambra doesn’t touch upon any painful historical moment although he reflectively approaches the experience of growing up during Pinochet’s brutal regime; the silent generation that still finds it hard to come to terms with their nation’s disorienting history. In other words, Zambra’s concise and unpretentious prose doesn’t revolve around any particular, single event from the past (personal or historical), but rather contemplates ways to reconcile the elusive memories of the past with the present.

Divided into four chapters, the novel opens with the childhood experiences of a nine-year-old boy in the mid-80s, Santiago, Chile. Written like a diary, this part chronicles the boy’s friendship with the 12-year-old Claudia. She is the niece to the boy’s allegedly Christian Democrat neighbor, Raul. Later, Claudia asks the boy to spy on her uncle, and report her the details during their weekly rendezvous. The Pinochet dictatorship is referenced in this part, but from a child’s understanding of politics. He also closely watches Raul’s house to report the visit of Raul’s friend and a mysterious young girl. But the boy doesn’t exactly understand why Claudia has asked him to spy on Raul or who the young woman is, or why Claudia abruptly moved away, because as the title of this chapter indicates, the boy is just a ‘Secondary Character’.

Alejandro Zambra depicts what the critics call as ‘the shadow of the Pinochet era’. Hence the country’s history of terror always seems to be the ‘elephant in the room’. And since Zambra’s generation were either shielded from the brutalities of the dictatorship or remained less cognizant of what happened around them (during childhood), silence is expected from them (‘secondary characters in the literature of their parents’). The moment they try to talk of history or the past to the older generation, they get the variation of ‘you don’t know the suffering & pain we went through.” In a joke in the 2^nd part of the novel, a boy says to his dad, ‘When I grow I want to be a secondary character’, to which the dad asks ‘Why?’, and the boy smugly replies, ‘Because the novel is yours’.

The second part revolves around an un-named narrator in the present (2009-10; set around the democratic Chile’s Presidential election). We can assume that this narrator is the voice of the author himself who confesses that the previous chapter is a fictionalized version of his childhood. He has separated from his beloved wife, Eme, yet they meet each other often. He compels ex-wife Eme to read the manuscript of his slowly evolving new novel, in which he says she’s the protagonist. In the third chapter, the narrator brings together Claudia and the boy, set in the present (it becomes clear that Claudia represents the author’s ex). The Meta narration turns weightier and the symbolisms become more appealing in the 4^th chapter. Eventually, it becomes a novel about a novelist expressing how difficult it is to write a novel.

Ways of Going Home is a superb meditative novel, even without taking into account the very Chilean context. It pays tribute to the vocation of writing. It deals with the slippery nature of memory, the power of nostalgia, and honesty in art. Zambra tells a very simple story, but the beauty lies in the way he dissects the different levels of memory; an individual’s memory engaged in a perpetual conflict with the inherited narrative of the parents and also from the collective recollection of history. The author finds catharsis in dissociating himself from the traditional framing of fiction, and by acknowledging the uncertainty in life. Ways of Going Home could be simply labeled as ‘metafictional failed love stories’. But that won’t do justice to the emotionally affective writing style of Zambra, or to his profound, creative use of intertextuality. Overall, it’s a short, elegant novel that fascinatingly converses and transcends the novel-narrative form.