Wowzers!
Carlos Gamerro's The Islands - Latin American magical realism meets William Gibson cyberpunk, Tana French detective novel, Vertigo-like psychological thriller, simmering over the trauma of war, in this case, Argentina's 1982 Malvinas/Falkland Islands War.
If this combination strikes you as a tad dense or ponderous, please be aware generous helpings of Mikhail Bulgakov absurdist humor and thigh-slapping Monty Python-style comedy pepper many scenes.
We're in 1992 Buenos Aires. The tale's narrator is a coke snorting computer hacker by the name of Felipe Félix who also happens to be a Malvinas combat vet. Félix is roused from his mid-morning slumber and summoned to meet with business mogul Sr Fausto Taánmerl in his office of mirrors atop a gleaming Puerto Madero skyscraper.
With Felipe's summons we hear echoes of the novel's opening line: “A fly caught in the web, while the spider, replete from its last meal, takes a while to reach him, can have a pretty good time of it if he relaxes while he waits.”
The opening line, in turn, relates to the book's epigraph taken from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, citing how the inferno is already here with us and we can escape suffering in one of two ways: 1) accept it, become part of it, so much so we no longer see it as an inferno; 2) recognize who and what are not the inferno and give them space to endure. This second choice demands constant vigilance and apprehension.
I can assure you, The Islands also requires a reader's complete attention. Is Carlos Gamerro warning us this phase of Argentine history, both for the characters in the novel and readers of the novel, is also a kind of inferno?
Consider this question in light of what the author himself said about his novel during an interview: "I want to make difficult stuff as easy as possible for that reader, but what I’m not prepared to do is discard something because it will be hard to understand or stomach. In that sense, the beginning of The Islands is a bit of a warning. It begins with a guy who has preserved one of his turds and lives in a tower made of mirrors and buggers his own adult son."
The guy with his turd it no ordinary guy, he's the above mentioned Sr Fausto Tamerlán and his preserved turd is no ordinary turd, it's the very bodily excrement (gold nuggets included) Tamerlán discharged at the time when he took over supreme control of his family business.
Likewise, Tamerlán buggering his adult son is no ordinary buggering but something out of Naked Lunch (Carlos Gamerro counts William S. Burroughs as a prime influence). "Sailing over the general viscousness, the two bodies had lost their original human shape and were now expanding and contracting like exposed organs in a vivisection, swelling transparent to bursting point one moment and collapsing into voided, crumpled bags the next, and, like decomposition in time-lapse, they quickly mingled and merged."
One reason I included this above quote: to underscore the author's dramatic shifts of register. We'll be laughing at a bit of over-the-top absurdity or what comes across as a Laurel and Hardy skit (in one hilarious scene, there's a fat sales manager, "his tubby fingers started fidgeting, Hardy-like with the tip of his tie") but just when we're beginning to settle in, ready for the next laugh, we'll be hit by, for example, an attractive lady recounting weeks of torture that left scars all over her youthful body, so much excruciating pain she was actually thankful when her torturers unzipped their pants as a first step to raping her.
Back on the reason why Tamerlán called Felipe. The Argentine superman (Tamerlán's own appraisal of his personhood) needs the super hacker to perform a feat of computer magic: dig out the names of more than two dozen witnesses to his son's crime of pushing an unknown somebody out the window to his death, a pushing through a window in the very room where they are standing.
Felipe thus takes on the role of Philip Marlowe (or, if you like, Antoinette Conway or Harry Hole) with the skills set of a cyberpunker. However, the major force Felipe encounters throughout Carlos Gamerro's 550-page saga: the harrowing memories, both his own and others' memories, of events in 1982 revolving around the Malvinas.
The Islands is a ferocious novel, a challenging novel, a novel nearly impossible to summarize or categorize. After wrestling with the various possible ways I could conclude my review of this novel, I've decided to simply turn it over to Carlos Gamerro, as per the following direct quotes:
"We're ready for a new existence outside time, outside the body, and they want to keep us prisoners in here! When personal virtual reality exists, we'll all be able to live in any world we like and write its laws. Only then will we be free!"
"The town, which had lasted just seventy-four days, would attain eternal life through him, and I was standing before someone who'd found a purpose in life and given himself to it body and soul, to the exclusion of all else, rejecting other realities as, deaf to any voices but the ones that reach him from the shores of his promised land."
"I always find it easier to invent than to copy, maybe because the unpredictability of the video game is better suited to random outcomes and the open possibilities of the imagination than to reproducing the frozen past."
"I'd become so immersed in cyberspace that I believed its electronic stimuli were the only sustenance I needed; it was inconceivable to interrupt my trance and attain to the demands of the flesh."
"I'd always been amazed how easily people are killed in films: bang and you're dead, bang and you're dead...The video game has perfected this: people don't even die; they just go out, no screaming, no lingering agony or spilled guts, no blame or grief or disgust."
"It would all happen so fast that Verraco would relive every minute of those seventy-four days in one or two hours of game-time, the way they say a drowning man relives his whole life dissolved in the water filling his lungs."
"Without us, Man today would still be much the same as he was two hundred thousand years ago. We introduced inequality, and inequality is the engine of change. Without us, progress and civilization simply wouldn't have existed."
Argentine author Carlos Gamerro, born 1962
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