It is a sunny spring day in the city you have recently moved to, and on your way to work in the morning, you decide on a whim to get off the bus and walk instead. You are on a major boulevard, but at the point where you begin walking, removed from the city center, it is fairly empty. Your thoughts begin to wander, as they tend to do on a walk alone in the city, and soon you run into an acquaintance, the Mathematician. He has just returned from a trip to Europe, and the two of you fall into step and into conversation about the recent birthday party for Jorge Washington Noriega, which neither of you was able to attend, but which the Mathematician heard all about from Bot\u00f3n\u2014\u201cButton,\u201d a nickname whose origin you do not know, and a person you have never met, but whose word you are more or less forced to trust as the Mathematician begins to narrate the story of the celebration of the sixty-five years of Washington.<\/p>\n
Such is the premise of Juan Jos\u00e9 Saer\u2019s novel, only that “you” are in fact \u00c1ngel Leto, a young man who has just moved to the small city named Sante Fe and is working a number of bookkeeping jobs. The effect is the same, however, as Leto essentially becomes a reader of the Mathematician\u2019s story (according to Bot\u00f3n): as he listens, he goes forming a picture in his mind of the scene and the people involved, much as you might do when reading a book\u2014some objects incomplete or indefinite, facial features hazy or purely imagined, where those details are left out of the narrative: <\/p>\n
\nLeto, who is listening now to the Mathematician, has had to add an unforeseen pavilion and a grill he can barely picture, since most of the story takes place under the thatched roof of a generic pavilion, more or less the idea of a pavilion, without an overly defined shape, staked in a patio he can\u2019t picture with absolute clarity, where familiar and unfamiliar people possessing, as the Mathematician mentions them, distinct gradations of reality, drink a kind of beer that Leto has never seen, smelled, touched, or tasted [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
This is a book about storytelling and reading, and we quickly begin to get a sense of the multiple layers making up Saer\u2019s masterfully crafted narrative. Its structure is Cervantine in its multiple nested narrative frames, where a typical scene in the book may be a joke told by Washington, relayed by Bot\u00f3n to the Mathematician, who then tells it simultaneously to Leto and to us readers, all of which is ultimately framed by the narrator of the text we hold in our hands. To make things just a touch more complex, we can add one more frame to that structure by taking into account the fact that this is a translation.<\/p>\n
As translator, Steve Dolph makes a wise move in choosing to preserve the long sentence structure (it is not infrequent to read more than a dozen or even a couple dozen lines of text before reaching a period) and complex syntax of Saer\u2019s text. The style is an essential complement to the layered narrative structure of the book, and it is extremely well executed, in that it draws attention to itself as being extraordinary without being off-putting or feeling too “foreign.” Mechanically flawless, the sentences are not messy or nonsensical, and where they might demand extra attention from the reader to follow the narrative thread, the narrator himself restores balance with his habit of casually checking himself, as in “he\u2014the Mathematician, no?\u2014” or “\u2014Bot\u00f3n I was saying, no?,” or repeating pieces of information, to clarifying and often comedic effect:<\/p>\n
\nLeto follows the Mathematician\u2019s story [. . .] with some difficulty [. . .] transparent passages that allow his imagination, turning on and off intermittently, to construct expressive and fleeting images: there was a feast at the house of someone named Basso, in Colastin\u00e9, at the end of August, to celebrate Washington\u2019s birthday, and they had started discussing a horse that had stumbled; the Mathematician\u2014it was Tomatis who gave him the nickname\u2014heard about it from Bot\u00f3n the Saturday before on the Paran\u00e1 ferry, Bot\u00f3n, a guy he has heard about several times but whom he has not had the pleasure of meeting, and then Washington had said that the horse was not an acceptable example for the problem they were discussing\u2014Leto asks himself darkly, without daring to make the case to the Mathematician out of fear that the Mathematician will look down on him a little, what the hell the so-called problem could be\u2014that the mosquito, if Leto understood correctly, would be a more appropriate creature [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Besides having multiple narrative frames and sentences with extraordinary numbers of commas, the text is impressive in its several concurrent narratives. There is of course the narrative of Washington\u2019s birthday party, as well as perhaps the most obvious narrative of the characters walking down the street. Besides those two lines, there are shorter strands consisting of, for instance, the Mathematician\u2019s commentary on his trip to Europe, or his telling of his running into Bot\u00f3n on the ferry to Paran\u00e1 to watch a rugby game. In addition, as readers we are given access to the unvoiced thoughts and memories of Leto and the Mathematician. In Leto\u2019s case, his thoughts are preoccupied by reflections on the recent loss of his father and childhood memories relevant to his relationship with his father and mother. The Mathematician, on the other hand, is haunted by the memory of what he calls \u201cThe Incident,\u201d wherein he temporarily went mad in response to being stood up by a Buenos Aires poet who had promised to discuss with him the Mathematician\u2019s laboriously crafted thoughts entitled The Fourteen Points Toward All Future Meter<\/em>. The Mathematician does not reveal any portion of this story to Leto; it is only as readers of Saer\u2019s text that we are privileged to play witness to this episode that is so telling of the Mathematician\u2019s character. Later, we will see the Mathematician on a plane to Sweden, fleeing the military dictatorship in Argentina and recalling his meeting in Paris with Pich\u00f3n Garay who, years after the event, attempts to recall once more the details of Washington\u2019s sixty-fifth birthday party. This episode naturally does not figure into the Mathematician\u2019s conversation with Leto on their walk down San Mart\u00edn Boulevard, since it will be years before the dictatorship comes to power. Again, as readers of the multiply framed text, we are privileged to enjoy additional depth of context, in this case, the revelation of a darker sociopolitical setting for a mostly lighthearted comedy.<\/p>\n
All this narrative richness is made possible through an omniscient narrator who is, atypically, also a first-person narrator. While the narrator is not himself a character who plays a role in the novel, he does take on some personality by virtue of narrating in the first person. This unusual combination creates a sense of listening to a narrated film or an audiobook: the narrator can report and comment on the observable story as well as on the characters\u2019 unspoken thoughts, in the way no typical player could, and yet we are continually reminded that there is a human voice behind the narration. The reader, just as Leto\u2014who joins the Mathematician on the street for a stroll and a story\u2014walks alongside the narrator while he unravels his tale.<\/p>\n
In his debut translated book, Dolph brings us a delightful read, with language that tickles the brain and a style that highlights Saer\u2019s inventiveness and expertly conveys his sense of humor\u2014muted, pseudo-academic, at times a little bit sad, much like Washington\u2019s own “subtle irony, which should probably leave you thoughtful and could, at the most, make you smile, inwardly more than anything“\u2014the kind that elicits more a half snicker than an LOL<\/span>, less likely to attract strange looks from, say, fellow commuters as you read The Sixty-Five Years of Washington<\/em> on your way downtown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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