{"id":296426,"date":"2014-02-07T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-07T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2014\/02\/07\/the-mongolian-conspiracy\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:44:27","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:44:27","slug":"the-mongolian-conspiracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2014\/02\/07\/the-mongolian-conspiracy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mongolian Conspiracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Noir is not an easy genre to define\u2014or if it once was, that was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away; as a quick guess, maybe Silver Lake, Los Angeles, 1935. When two books as different as Rafael Bernal\u2019s The Mongolian Conspiracy<\/em> (Mexico, 1969) and C\u00e9sar Aira\u2019s Shantytown<\/em><\/a> (originally published in 2001 in Argentina) can both be labeled \u201cnoir,\u201d there\u2019s something funny going on. Both are translations from Spanish, published late in 2013 by New Directions, but the similarities end about there. Does the label mean anything useful anymore, or is there a better way to describe these books and their merits?<\/p>\n

As near as I can make out, the essential elements of noir are 1) there\u2019s no clear good or bad, just shades of gray and 2) the bodies pile up so fast everyone (reader, protagonists) loses track. As a corollary to these two axioms, the central mystery is often left unsolved, or replaced by a larger and murkier one\u2014so readers with a taste for the traditional pleasures of the whodunit will go hungry. But fortunately there\u2019s element 3) it\u2019s done in a tone or voice so compelling that the most grisly and relentless events become entertaining, sometimes moving, even funny. Bernal and Aira both meet all three criteria, though in very different ways. <\/p>\n

Rafael Bernal, born 1915, was a seasoned writer of mid-brow local color and detective tales (and, like so many great Latin American writers, a diplomat) when he wrote The Mongolian Conspiracy<\/em> in 1968. After the 1910 revolution, Mexico had never really settled into a functioning democracy, and with the Tlatelolco student massacre the country seemed to be headed in the wrong direction fast. Somehow knowing this would be his last novel, Bernal tore the roof off The Mongolian Conspiracy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Filiberto Garc\u00eda is Bernal\u2019s antihero, a ready-to-retire police detective who\u2019s never quite broken out of low-level cleanup (i.e. killing) assignments for one corrupt government department or another. The KGB<\/span>, in Mongolia, has heard rumors of a Chinese conspiracy to assassinate the US president on his upcoming trip to Mexico City. The Americans and Russians both send agents to uncover the plot, and Garc\u00eda is assigned to be their local guide. Or as he puts it, \u201cNow I\u2019ve been promoted to the Department of International Intrigue. Holy shit!\u201d The world-weary government thug thus finds himself called out day and night to try to pick apart the threads of a delicate geopolitical clusterfuck. Meanwhile, he\u2019s made his first emotional connection since forever with Marta, a girl from Chinatown who may herself be implicated in the plots and counterplots\u2014but to sleep with her, he\u2019ll first have to get a chance to sleep at all.<\/p>\n

There are some fantastic set pieces, like the conversation where the Russian and the American compare memories of the coups and conspiracies they\u2019ve staged around the world, while the Mexican listens on in envy\u2014he\u2019s only ever been involved in home-brewed trouble. The Russian asks, \u201cAn electrical cord is very effective. Don\u2019t you think so, Filiberto?\u201d and that sends Garc\u00eda into a reverie worthy of Sam Peckinpah:<\/p>\n

\n

It was in Huasteca, and I was carrying out orders. Puny old devil who spent the whole day in his rocking chair on the porch of his house. The Boss gave the order. I came up behind him with the cord. . . . When he stopped moving, I put him in a coffin we had brought, and we took the main road out of town. The best way to carry a body discreetly is in a coffin. A laborer coming down the road with his oxen even doffed his hat when he saw it. Then, suddenly, as we turned a corner, the fucking old man started kicking. Like he wanted someone to notice. We had to lower the coffin, open it, and give him another squeeze with the same cord. Fucking rowdy old man!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Francisco Goldman, in his Introduction, says \u201cthe real action [of The Mongolian Conspiracy<\/em>] springs from its language.\u201d The narrative often slips directly inside Garc\u00eda\u2019s thoughts as he tries to piece together a moral stance from the shit surrounding him. Like the distinction between mere \u201cstiffs\u201d and a real \u201ccorpse\u201d (the kind of body that might once have harbored a soul): \u201cFucking stiffs! You don\u2019t only have to make them, you\u2019ve also got to carry them as if they were children.\u201d The old killer begins to suspect he has a heart after all. Or worry that he\u2019s had one all along.<\/p>\n

But Bernal\u2019s Garc\u00eda doesn\u2019t quite hang together as a voice, for all his vigorous cursing. The language stumbles from the stiff and formal to tough-guy talk that would make Philip Marlowe blush, without (to my ear) settling into a vernacular consistent and believable for the time and setting. I don\u2019t fault translator Katherine Silver\u2014I\u2019ve seen her skill at a remarkable range of registers in other works\u2014so I wonder whether Bernal was just a little out of his depth. It must have been a tough assignment, an insider-turned-outsider inventing a language for someone who is just crossing that line himself. There\u2019s no doubting why its plot and characters make it a \u201crevered cult masterpiece,\u201d but forty-five years later the lasting punch of The Mongolian Conspiracy<\/em> may be not in its own language, but in the language it paved the way for, from Roberto Bola\u00f1o to \u00c1lvaro Enrigue and . . . “C\u00e9sar Aira“https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/index.php?id=9592.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Noir is not an easy genre to define\u2014or if it once was, that was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away; as a quick guess, maybe Silver Lake, Los Angeles, 1935. When two books as different as Rafael Bernal\u2019s The Mongolian Conspiracy (Mexico, 1969) and C\u00e9sar Aira\u2019s Shantytown (originally published in 2001 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[696,56,54996,53526,6516,55006],"class_list":["post-296426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-katherine-silver","tag-new-directions","tag-owen-rowe","tag-rafael-bernal","tag-spanish-literature","tag-the-mongolian-conspiracy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296426"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":338636,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296426\/revisions\/338636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}