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.