Surrender by Ray Loriga

Published in Spain in 2017; published in translation by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Mariner Books on February 25, 2020

In spirit and tone, Surrender brings to mind José Saramago. Ray Loriga’s style is less delightfully rambling than Saramago’s, but it is chatty and intimate, as if the author were telling a meandering story to a good friend. The story combines surrealism with the realistic fears of war-torn people who are willing to surrender their individuality for the sake of gaining security through conformity.

The place where the war occurs is unspoken, as are its participants. We know only that the war is not going well for the place where the narrator resides. His two sons went to war, but the narrator does not know if they are still alive. The bombs are coming closer. The only good news, from the narrator’s perspective, is the appearance of Julio, a mute boy who wandered into the narrator’s life. The narrator and his wife keep Julio hidden in their basement. “If all goes well and he behaves himself, maybe we’ll move him upstairs one day, to our sons’ room.”

The zone agent tells the narrator that the decade-long war is being lost, that everyone must evacuate to the transparent city. The narrator has no choice but to trust the government, provisional though it may be, because the alternative is anarchy or death. After all, the government protected them from their wet nurse who cared so tenderly for their children. They made no protest when the government took her because they were grateful for its vigilance.

The story follows the narrator, his wife, and Julio as they make a difficult journey to the transparent city, where everything is indeed transparent. Walls are made of a transparent crystal; everyone is visible to everyone else as they shower, shit, shag, and sleep. The experience leads the narrator to understand that “although some of us have more flesh in this or that place and others have less, we’re basically all the same.”

Everyone in the transparent city is required to take three showers a day, but the water has properties that go beyond washing away dirt. The narrator soon finds himself unreasonably happy, so happy he doesn’t object when Julio’s tutor takes the narrator’s wife to bed. “My perennial happiness stuck to me the way goat poop sticks to your hunting boots.” Yet the narrator has a premonition that his happiness will come undone. “Sometimes you have to wait for things to unfold, even though you already sense what’s going to happen, because if you don’t, people will call you crazy.”

People in the transparent city must do what they are told, lest their heads be posted at the front gate. At first, surrendering control of his life seems fine to the narrator, because contentment has always been his goal. “Once you admit that god hasn’t chosen you to do anything extraordinary, you start to really live the way you should, with your head and feet inside a circle marked in the sand, not stepping out beyond your terrain or hankering for what isn’t yours.” When he recalls his past, the narrator occasionally searches his soul “for some shred of my old self, but it was useless, I couldn’t find it.”

“What malice lurks in the soul of a man who doesn’t recognize himself as one among many?” the narrator asks. The question is poignant in a time when selfish people eschew social distancing, but Loriga turns the question on its head. The narrator feels that the “tiny circle of my affections and concerns” helped him understand what matters, while being “part of something functional that assures my well-being and calls for my participation” makes him “feel inexorably excluded from the common good.” The resolution of that conflict, Surrender suggests, requires individuals within a society to retain their individuality even if they are necessarily part of something bigger.

The novel is also an argument against contentment as an ultimate goal. Nobody in the transparent city is hungry or sick, everyone is forced to feel protected and happy, “but was that enough to live?” The narrator misses doing things that cause pain, simply because the pain resulted from his free will. And in “the strange peace of the transparent city,” he and his wife have stopped loving each other, perhaps because they have stopped struggling together to attain the things that the transparent city gives them. Or perhaps it has something to do with the wife shagging the tutor.

At some point the reader will wonder whether the narrator is reliable. Is it true that nothing smells bad in the city, including the excrement that the narrator hauls away on a tractor every day? Is Julio really a savant, as the narrator believes, capable of speech but wisely remaining silent? In the end it doesn’t matter. The story is strange and wonderful, and even if the narrator can’t be trusted to tell us the truth, Loriga conveys many truths about the conflict between the demands of society and the needs of the individual.

RECOMMENDED

Like Flies from Afar by K. Ferrari

Published in Spain in 2011; published in translation by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on March 24, 2020

Mr. Machi has a problem. Someone deliberately caused his BMW to have a flat tire. When he opened the trunk to find the spare, he instead found a dead body. His instinct is to get rid of the body, but it is attached to the trunk’s hinge with the fur-covered handcuffs he keeps for encounters with his mistress.

Getting rid of the body is a challenge, even in Buenos Aires, where dead bodies are not uncommon. But as he gathers the tools he needs to detach the corpse from his trunk, Mr. Machi is preoccupied with thoughts of how the body — of someone he doesn’t recognize — ended up in his car. He doesn’t think he has many enemies, certainly none who would go such extravagant lengths to cause such a serious problem. And how many of them could know about the fur-covered handcuffs?

Much of Like Flies from Afar consists of Mr. Machi scrutinizing memories of the people he has angered or alienated. His wife. His gay son. His daughter’s boyfriend. His bodyguard. Various women. People who have an interest in the Buenos Aires club he owns. The employees he fired after years of loyal service for missing a shift. Although he won’t admit it to himself or doesn’t care, it seems unlikely that anyone actually likes Mr. Machi, because he acts with a callous disregard for the people he doesn’t actively despise. Mr. Machi thinks of himself as an innocent victim, but the reader recognizes that his shallow lack of self-awareness is a barrier that shields him from self-reproach.

Like Flies from Afar is a dark comedy. Mr. Machi’s cluelessness furnishes the humor. The story, in fact, builds to a surprising punchline. Readers might be disappointed that there is no satisfying resolution of the mystery — its continuation is left to the reader’s imagination — but the ending is a satisfying, and almost karmic, non-resolution of the simple plot.

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Point of Balance by J.G. Jurado

Published in Spain in 2014; published in translation by Atria Books on August 11, 2015

David Evans, the top neurosurgeon at an exclusive D.C. hospital, comes home to find his daughter and her nanny missing. The kidnapper, who seems to know all there is to know about Evans, does not want ransom money. Instead, Evans is asked to engage in what might (with some understatement) be termed medically unethical behavior. The moral dilemma that Evans faces -- kill an important patient or lose his daughter -- drives the story.

Evans is a rather bland protagonist. Although he tells us the usual stories about the god delusion that plagues surgeons, Evans doesn't suffer from delusions or anything else that would give him a personality.

The bad guy, who calls himself Mr. White, is sort of a sociopathic megalomaniac, which makes him more interesting than Evans. White's study of psychology has turned manipulation of others into a scientific art. I liked that, but White's expertise as a computer hacker is trite and silly. White turns out to be working for the real bad guy, whose identity is only partially revealed. That's disappointing, as is the failure to explain the unidentified bad guy's motivation for wanting the crime to be committed.

The sister of Evans' dead wife (who once considered herself a rival for Evan's affections) is rather conveniently in a law enforcement position that puts her close to the action. J.G. Jurado tries to give the story more depth by giving the dead wife's sister unresolved feelings for Evans. The resulting interaction comes across as a melodramatic soap opera. The sister is ridiculously self-pitying when she isn't being ridiculously judgmental. Jurado's attempts to humanize Evans with saccharine memories of his wife are a little nauseating.

The plot, at least in broad terms, is a familiar one. That doesn't make the story bad, but it does call upon the writer to give it a fresh twist and to avoid following a predictable path. Jurado's efforts are moderately successful, but the story fails to realize its potential.

The plot is farfetched but that's normal enough for conspiracy thrillers. This one is marred by White's decision to give Evans an extra challenge midway through the novel that makes no sense whatsoever. It is the kind of plot complication that exists only to add more action to the story. If some rational explanation existed for the added action I would be fine with it, but this situation was so contrived that I could only shake my head.

Later in the novel, White engages in an unnecessarily risky act of violence that I could not begin to believe. White seems determined to do everything he can to screw up his assignment. A scene that has Evans in one of D.C.'s bad neighborhoods is the kind of thing that is imagined by writers who have never been in a bad neighborhood.

Medical thrillers depend upon interesting medical trivia to engage the reader's interest. I liked the "inside baseball" of neurosurgery and hospital administration. I wish there had been more of that. I also liked the zippy speed at which the story moves. The story holds a couple of mild surprises and some excitement near the end, but they do not quite overcome the novel's faults. The ending tries to be clever but it doesn't quite make sense.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Good Suicides by Antonio Hill

Published in Spain in 2012; published in translation by Crown on June 17, 2014

Is pleasant deception preferable to ugly truth? A character in The Good Suicides is told that "honesty is an overrated concept," a value less worthy than loyalty. That theme plays out in Antonio Hill's second Hector Salgado novel.

Inspector Hector Salgado, an Argentinian by birth who now lives in Barcelona, is seeing a therapist to help him come to terms with the disappearance of Ruth Valldaura, the ex-wife who left him for a woman. Salgado believes that premature mourning of Ruth would be a betrayal despite his fear that she is dead. He wants to heed the therapist's reminder that life consists of what we have, not what is missing, but he cannot stop blaming himself. The only lead suggests that Ruth disappeared due to a curse cast by a witch doctor who was severely beaten by Salgado after Salgado broke up his profitable prostitution ring (an event that apparently happened in The Summer of Dead Toys).

Having been removed from the investigation of Ruth's disappearance, Salgado is assigned to investigate the suicide of Sarah Mahler, who apparently jumped in front of a subway train after reading the only message on her cellphone: the text "Never Forget" accompanied by a photograph of three hanged dogs. Sarah was employed by Alemany Cosmetics, where another employee recently killed himself, but only after he also killed his wife and child. It soon becomes clear that the two were among eight individuals at Alemany Cosmetics who attended a team-building retreat and are now keeping a dark secret, the nature of which remains a mystery for much of the novel.

The novel's other key character is Leire Castro, Salgado's subordinate. Leire can't abide the thought of spending the last six weeks of unplanned pregnancy alone in her new apartment. She foregoes her maternity leave to spend her time investigating Ruth's disappearance.

Understated and tasteful subplots involving a character's attraction to his fiancé's daughter and a woman's submission to her dominant partner add spice to the story. Other storylines of domestic drama involve Leire's uncertain relationship with her baby's daddy, Salgado's struggle to raise his sullen teenage son, and tension between two Alemany siblings. Those aspects of the story give flesh to the characters without resorting to melodrama.

The first of the novel's two mysteries -- why are employees of Alemany Cosmetics dying and what's up with the dead dogs? -- resolves straightforwardly. Still, I was not convinced of the characters' motivations for acting as they did, both initially and (in some cases) after the initial event takes place. As for the second mystery -- the disappearance of Ruth -- I have to admit I found the final pages baffling. I'm not sure they do anything more than set up the next novel. That's disappointing, but effective if the point is to make readers buy more books. I'll probably read the next novel, if only because I liked the intimate psychological portraits of the key characters in this one. I have the sense, however, that I should have started reading this series with the first novel rather than the second.

RECOMMENDED

My Father's Ghost is Climbing in the Rain by Patricio Pron

Published in Spain in 2011; published in translation by Knopf on May 21, 2013

We are told that the events described in My Father's Ghost is Climbing in the Rain are mostly true. We're also told that the novel's narrator (unnamed in the text, but I'll give him the author's first name since he claims to be telling us his own story) is unreliable. He warns the reader that his words can be taken either as truth or invention since he is incapable of distinguishing one from the other.

Patricio is a journalist who has an uneasy relationship with the truth. Entire years are missing from Patricio's memory, so it's fitting that some chapter numbers are missing from My Father's Ghost -- chapters skipped over, like the chapters of the narrator's life -- while other chapter numbers are out of sequence or repeated, presumably reflecting Patricio's scattered thoughts. Patricio blames the gaps in his life on the medications his psychiatrist was dispensing, drugs that made him feel like he was "floating in a pool without ever seeing its bottom but not being able to reach the surface." The reader soon discovers, however, that Patricio's memory loss is a form of self-protection. Patricio grew up in Argentina, "a country called fear with a flag that was a face filled with dread." The terrors of life during Argentina's rule by a military dictatorship are best forgotten, but the novel is about Patricio's compulsion to remember.

After eight years in Germany, Patricio returns to Argentina to say goodbye to his father, who is languishing in a hospital bed. In his father's study, he finds a folder labeled Alberto Burdisso. Its contents describe a simple-minded man who has disappeared from El Trébol, the city where Patricio spent part of his childhood. Burdisso had been awarded reparations for his sister's disappearance three decades earlier, money that led to his death. As Patricio reads through the file's contents, he learns that the city he believed to be idyllic is in fact sordid, sullied, and sad.

Patricio takes us through the file, document by document. His investigation of the file becomes an attempt to find his father "in his last thoughts." In this, Patricio is like other Argentinians of his generation, solving their parents' pasts like detectives, "and what we were going to find out would seem like a mystery novel we wished we'd never bought." Yet literature is a "pale reflection" of, and cannot do justice to, the beliefs and ideals of his father's generation. In real life, unlike novels -- and particularly in Argentina during the 1970s -- mysteries go unsolved, crimes go unpunished, and the world outside the book is not "guided by the same principles of justice as the tale told inside."

Not surprisingly, in searching for his father Patricio begins to find himself. He comes to realize a truth: "You don't ever want to know certain things because what you know belongs to you, and there are certain things you never want to own." At the same time, he becomes convinced that he needs to tell the story of his father's generation because their ghost "was going to keep climbing in the rain until it took the heavens by storm."

All of this is an excellent premise for a novel. Patricio Pron nearly pulls it off, but in the end, the excellent story he tells is just too slim to attain such a lofty goal. What we learn about the father is fragmentary (intentionally so, given the novel's structure) and superficial. The narrator tells us that "what my parents and their comrades had done didn't deserve to be forgotten," but we learn very little about their struggle. At the same time, Patricio shares few of his recovered memories with the reader. The novel ultimately reads like a preface to a greater story that needs to be told, but it isn't told here.

That isn't to say that I disliked the story Pron tells. There are some stunning sentences in My Father's Ghost, the kind that make you pause and reread them two or three times. Not all of My Father's Ghost works (a series of brief chapters that describe Patricio's fever dreams add nothing to the story), but through most of the novel, Pron's intense prose is riveting. Viewed as a slice of life, the beginning of a journey yet to be completed, this small novel is quite rewarding. 

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