Urgent Matters by Paula Rodriguez

First published in Spain in 2021; published in translation by Pushkin Vertigo on July 25, 2023

Urgent Matters is Argentinian noir spiced with dark humor. Its focus is on the reaction of characters to urgent events that always seem to surprise them.

Hugo Lamadrid is a passenger on a train that crashes. He survives, although he wakes up surrounded by corpses. He’s holding a prayer card for the patron saint of urgent matters when rescuers arrive to cut open his carriage and hoist him to freedom.

The rescuers take Hugo to a hospital. He lost his phone and wallet in the crash so he’s relieved when he isn’t quickly identified. Hugo seizes an opportunity to escape from the hospital. He’s worried that his friend Beto might have talked to the police. Beto is worried that the police are coming for him.

Hugo committed a small, unintended crime. Small in Hugo’s eyes, but the police might have a different view, even in Argentina. Beto helped him clean up the mess. Hugo wants to protect Beto but Hugo is not a deep thinker. “He’s pure intuition and argumentative noise.”

At the crash scene, Detective Osvaldo Domínguez finds Hugo’s phone and reads a text from Marta Lacase asking if Hugo is okay. After Domínguez visits Marta, she and her daughter Evelyn pack their bags with cash and leave Buenos Aires. They make an unexpected visit to Marta’s sister Mónica and their mother Olga in Colon, where Mónica works as the slot manager at a casino. Each family member seems to view crime as a useful sideline, although they often keep the details of their criminal enterprises hidden from each other.

Different characters have different opinions about whether Hugo is alive or dead. Only a couple of characters have opinions that are based on facts. El Rifle is a television journalist who knows Hugo. He makes a national news story out of the authorities’ inability to say whether Hugo died in the train accident. Evelyn would also like to know whether her father is alive or dead. Olga is unhappy when she learns that Hugo didn’t die in the crash, but she doesn’t share that knowledge with Evelyn or with reporters who are camped on her doorstep, covering the prayer vigil for Hugo.

Third-person point of view jumps from character to character to tell the unfolding story. The plot loosely follows Domínguez as he tries to learn the truth about Hugo’s fate (a truth that doesn’t concern his superiors, who believe the publicity will be more favorable to them if they simply report that Hugo is dead). To the extent that the story resolves, it does so shortly after a roller coaster ride that Hugo and Beto share.

Roller coasters are a popular metaphor for life, one that Hugo cannot help but notice. “The momentum comes from the first fall. It’s the only one that matters. Everything that comes after it is downhill, even if you’re going up. If you go up a little, it’s so you fall with more force. You’re falling from the start.” Such is life, or at least Hugo’s life.

Olga’s bitterness adds comic relief, as do arguments about which prayers for Hugo will play well with the television audience. The prayer-givers are fickle; when neither Hugo nor his corpse turn up after a couple of days, they lose interest. If prayers go unanswered, maybe it’s time to pray for something else. The media’s fixation on a story about which they know nothing is another source of humor.

My favorite comic moments involve Mónica’s impressive collection of vibrators. Evelyn panics when she steals a cellphone that she hides in a vibrator box. Getting caught with the vibrator is somewhat preferable to getting caught with the stolen phone, despite the lectures she must endure about the damage a vibrator can cause to a virgin.

Urgent Matters is not the kind of crime story that builds tension with each plot twist. The plot is simple and linear; nearly all violence occurs offstage. Like prayer, crime and corruption are simply part of Argentinian life. Characters write their own fates and (like Donnie Brasco in the movie of the same name) they understand and accept without argument that their actions have inevitable consequences. The novel uses a crime plot to deliver grins and soft laughter rather than thrills. Because it does so effectively with sympathetic characters, Urgent Matters is a refreshing change from heavier fare.

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The Woman from Uruguay by Pedro Mairal

 Published in Argentina in 2016; published in translation by Bloomsbury Publishing on July 20, 2021

The Woman from Uruguay is written as a confession, or perhaps an explanation. The narrator tells the story of a couple of eventful days in his life, bracketed by less dramatic events before and after those days. He is speaking to his wife, the mother of his child. He asks banal questions like, “At what point did the monster you and I were start getting paralyzed?” It almost seems that he is bringing his wife up to speed on his life before and after they broke up. Since she is certainly aware of much of the story, including the reason their relationship ended, the narrator is clearly speaking to a larger reading audience while pretending to be engaged in an intimate communication.

The narrator is Lucas Pereyra, a writer who lives in Argentina. He’s recently been paid a book advance. The funds are in his bank account in Uruguay. He intends to travel to Uruguay to pick up the funds, which he desperately needs. He wants to repay money he borrowed from his wife and friends and to spend nine months writing the book without needing to take on a teaching job. He plans to smuggle the cash into Argentina to avoid paying taxes. The amount exceeds import limits and he knows he’ll be in trouble if he’s caught by Customs.

Lucas has an ulterior motive for visiting Uruguay. He wants to see Magali Guerra Zabala, a woman he met once before while attending a writer’s conference in Uruguay. Their time together was frustratingly limited because they both needed to return to their lives and partners. They experienced “the sadness of fresh, just-discovered love.” Lucas can’t seem to get Guerra out of his mind. They begin an email exchange with promises to meet again.

Most of the story follows Lucas in Uruguay as he picks up the money and visits with Guerra. Nothing goes as he planned. Perhaps the novel should be seen as a commentary on the futility of planning, or at least as a comment on the risk that expectations will lead to unexpected turmoil.

Guerra offers familiar opinions of men in general (“The problem is you guys will hump anything that moves”) and of Lucas in particular (“You send me an email out of the blue saying you’re coming, you suddenly show up, you want us to race off to a hotel and have sex, and then you’re off to catch the ferry to go back”). Lucas offers familiar opinions of women in general (generally focused on how women make him feel “wounded, sexually, I mean, the injured male, depressed”) and of Guerra in particular (“How did I get mixed up in this Venezuelan soap opera?”).

Pedro Mairal creates some moments of drama that don’t involve relationships. He adds a crime to the story to create a conflict that forces Lucas to confront his life and his relationship with his wife when he returns to Argentina. Lucas does seem to learn something from his Uruguayan adventure and he at least claims to have changed his life. The primary change seems to be a willingness to accept his sorry fate. Whether readers will learn life lessons from Lucas’ experiences that they haven’t learned from similar stories, or from life, is doubtful.

Some of the plot seems forced, including the crime drama and the revelation that leads to the destruction of Lucas’ relationship. With regard to the revelation, I got the impression that Mairal was trying to be hip and trendy. If so, themes that might be hip in Venezuela are a bit stale to readers who encounter those themes on a regular basis.

In the end, Lucas feels betrayed by his wife (notwithstanding the number of times he cheated on her) and can’t decide whether he was betrayed (in a nonsexual way) by Guerra. Is there more to the story? Not really. Nothing in The Woman from Uruguay is particularly profound or unexpected. We know that things go wrong in life. We know that people betray each other. We know that some women enjoy making drama and that some men can’t keep it in their pants. That seems to be just as true in Uruguay as it is everywhere else in the world. Those are throw-away observations in deeper novels, but they seem to be the whole point of Mairal’s novel. Despite Mairal’s fluid prose and evocative descriptions of Uruguay, he offers little in The Woman from Uruguay that is fresh or exciting.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Papers in the Wind by Eduardo Sacheri

Published in Argentina in 2011; published in translation by Other Press on May 20, 2014

As Papers in the Wind opens, Mono Raguzzi has just been buried in a cemetery in Castelar, a city in Buenos Aires Province. His death is being mourned by his brother Fernando and his friends Mauricio and Ruso. Mono had a short-lived career in professional soccer before joining a Swiss technology firm. After leaving that job to spend more time his daughter, he used his severance pay to buy the transfer rights to a soccer player, Mario Pittilanga. Now his brother and friends are wondering what to do with Pittiglana, who (to put it mildly) has not lived up to his potential.

Papers in the Wind slides around in time. Some chapters show us Mono before his death, struggling to find himself after his soccer career ended, dealing with the shaky relationship with his girlfriend Lourdes that produced Guadalupe, his daughter, or coming to terms with the end of his life and of his lifelong friendships. Other chapters take place in the present as Mono's friends and brother try to work out a scheme to save Mono's investment in Pittiglana while convincing Lourdes to give them time with Guadalupe.

The four key characters have well-defined, consistent personalities. Facing death, Mono focuses on what has always been important in life -- friends, family, and soccer. Mauricio is a driven, self-centered lawyer who cheats on his wife and does his best to avoid the obligations of friendship. Ruso's marital strife is caused by his failure at every business he starts, but he is affable and a master at avoiding conflict. Fernando, a teacher, is so honorable that he drives his friends crazy. Whether the friendships will survive Mono's death is a question that becomes more urgent as divided loyalties begin to divide the friends. Each character will learn something about himself and about the nature of friendship before the novel concludes.

The politics of soccer in South America (and worldwide) are fascinating, even to a reader (like me) who doesn't give two hoots about the game itself. Oddly enough, while I'm not a soccer fan, I tend to enjoy soccer novels, in part because the writers usually convey their passion for the game, in part because they are often populated by passionate characters. As Mono approaches death, for instance, the one thing he wants to leave his daughter is his love for the local soccer team. That's a true fan. He also draws parallels between his life and the performance of that team -- a team of championship caliber before it began a steady decline. Like dying, supporting a losing team (and hoping for unlikely victories) gives you a better sense of what's important in life. It isn't winning championships. It's love of the game that counts -- and "the game" is everything in your life that matters to you.

With its discussions of death and theology, friendship and betrayal, love and romance, there is chewy meat on the bones of a novel that is also light-hearted and funny. The plot follows a curvy path that leaves the reader wondering whether the journey will terminate at a pleasant destination. I won't comment on that, but I will say that Papers in the Wind is a sad, funny, and meaningful book that I enjoyed from beginning to end.

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