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