Such a curious, oddball novel.
We're
in the swinging, hip 1960s and Kiki, a writer and poet, and his ex-wife
Celia shift, shake and jive through various locations and crazy
scenarios in the city of Megalopolis prior to a much anticipated blowout
party hosted by Brazilian aesthete and billionaire O Jango.
Enrique
Luis Revol's one and only novel (he wrote volumes of essays and poems)
begins as a satire about artists and intellectuals, mostly from Latin
America, who have fled dictatorships and land in Megalopolis, a world of
freedom and unimaginable pleasures. But then the final third of the
novel takes unexpected turns after the shocking discovery of charred
human bones in garbage that came from none other than O Jango's
apartment. Oh, baby! That must have been some party.
Abrupt Mutations is a highly polished literary work that shares affinities with Joyce's Ulysses and Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet
while containing elements of Raymond Chandler, John Barth, Philip K.
Dick, Jorge Luis Bores and Edgar Alan Poe. To provide a sampling, here
are a few tasty quotes along with my brief comments:
'Will a
vulgar thief, a jerk who brazenly goes through the bag of a sleeping
girl, have it in him to show up and change facing a huffy, forever
disdainful Julia Sierra?"
This quote is the final sentence in a charming short-story main character Kiki Minos writes entitled Missing Reality,
a story inserted in the beginning pages of the novel. The theme of a
missing piece in Kiki's reality is worth keeping in mind. And, yes, the
way Enrique Luis performs quick shifts in perspective, in tone, even in
his narrative voice, Abrupt Mutations serves as an appropriate title.
"The
marcher's slogans are in many different languages, as befits the
internationalism not only of these new Vandals who want to be called hippies, but also of this Megalopolis that is the most polyglot city in the world."
Megalopolis, a fictional city so international I was reminded of Jan Morris and her imagined land of Hav. My personal preference: the more languages, the more diverse the backgrounds of the denizens, the greater the city.
"infusing
the happening with everlasting life ought to be the mission of every
person conscious of the fact that the exhaustion of man's imaginative
capacity is equal to the extinction of the human species itself."
Tell
it like it is O Jango! As both an aesthetic and a billionaire, this
Brazilian knows how to sling a 1960s zinger to get everyone he wants to
attend his party.
"At this juncture of his honest tale, the
author feels a need to introduce into it a character who is entirely
fictitious. Police Commissioner (Chief) Peter Plaughman, who is
surrounded by a veritable swarm of individuals yanked from the most
convincing reality, as will immediately be seen."
Sounds like
Enrique Luis is out John Barthing John Barth here. How many levels of
meta-fiction are you able to spot in this simple quote?
"Against
the multiplicity of reality, fiction offers concrete, specific human
lives, which are always somewhat viscous and at least a little duel.
This gives it a highly appreciable advantage, namely: in fiction,
experience has already been evaluated, developed, and tightly tied down
so that it isn't susceptible to modification by every new
possibility...fiction is always infinitely more objective than anyone's
biographical experience."
So true - characters in fiction might be complex but at least they are all bound by the author's fixed words on the page.
Pick up a copy of Abrupt Mutations
to find out if the Chief Police Inspector can sort through all those
charred human bones. And you might be pleasantly surprised at the
exceptional quality of this fine literary work.
Brazilian author Enrique Luis Revol
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