Los sorias by Alberto Laiseca

 

Why hasn’t any of the writing by the great Argentine author Alberto Laiseca (1941–2016) been made available to English readers? This is surely one of the great travesties of world literature. And to think—he wrote thirteen novels, along with numerous short stories and essays, including Los sorias, his masterpiece: a work of over 1,300 pages, the longest and one of the most profound novels to emerge from Argentina’s rich literary tradition.

Although I've been studying Spanish going on two years now, I have several more years to go before I'm in a position to read Los sorias. Again, why hasn't this outstanding novel been translated into English? As a lover of Latin American literature, I feel particularly deprived.

To begin to appreciate the depth and breathtaking wonder of La sorias, please take a moment to read Andrei's review on his blog, The Untranslated, a blog about literature not yet available in English - https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com...

Here are a few quotes from Andrei's essay -

The Sorias is a visionary, erudite, cruel, surreal, uproarious, smutty, silly, puerile, absurd, cartoonish, megalomaniac and, many would say, downright psychotic work that is destined for a perennial cult status. Laiseca is the inheritor of the cultural codes left by François Rabelais, Dante Alighieri, Jonathan Swift, the Marquis de Sade, Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Francisco Goya. The only contemporary writer I can compare him to is Thomas Pynchon: The Sorias is the Gravity’s Rainbow of Latin America. On more than one occasion I was compelled to interrupt my reading, get up from the desk and take a dazed walk around the room in sheer disbelief: what the hell have I just read? Nothing prepares you for the weirdness of this book. Abandon sanity, all ye who enter here…

With more than 1300 pages, this is the longest Argentine novel ever written, and since it hasn’t been translated into any language yet, this might be the most notorious obscure novel of whose existence very few readers outside the Spanish language are aware. Which is not to say that the novel is that famous in the Spanish-speaking world either. The Sorias had a long and tortuous journey to its reader. It took Laiseca 10 years to write it, and 16 more to publish. There have been three editions of the novel so far with the total print run amounting to a measly 2,850 copies. The Sorias is a cult classic par excellence, read only by a small cenacle of the initiated, but much talked about amongst those exposed to its mythos. Many are now ardently seeking an opportunity to get hold of it, which might be a tall order not only because of the small number of the copies available on the market, but also due to the forbidding price. One of the earliest champions of the novel was the living classic of Argentine literature Ricardo Piglia, who famously said:”The Sorias is the best novel that has been written in Argentina since The Seven Madmen."

The novel is set in an alternative universe that, nevertheless, shares many of its features with our world. A cold war is in progress. There is growing tension between the superpowers called Technocracy and Soria. The latter has a close ally whose name is very well familiar to many of us: the Soviet Union. Despite being an imaginary construct, this country is very similar to the historical USSR. A crude map drawn by Laiseca himself represents the political geography of the known world consisting of a hispanicised Europe called Eurisberia and the colossal Soviet Union. The countries making up the Eurisberian continent are a farrago of fictional and real territories. On the one hand there is Catalonia, Castillia, Aragon, and the Caliphate of Cordoba; on the other, such exotic places as Protonia, Protelia, Chanchelia, Dervia, Goria, the already mentioned Soria and Technocracy, and a bunch of others. When the political organisation of these countries is described, there is hardly a hint of any democratic rule. So, most of them, if not all, are dictatorships of various stripes.

Although the novel’s title refers to Soria, most of the book is devoted to Technocracy. The virulent hostility between the two states makes us think about them at first as the sworn enemies with a long history of confrontation. But, as it turns out, both dictatorships are relatively new political entities, and in the past they used to be one nation. Faithful to its name, Technocracy is a state underpinned by well-nigh religious worship of technologies. The political elite is almost entirely composed of engineers. Most of the spheres of everyday life rely heavily on different machines, computers, and robots. The head of Technocracy bears the title Monitor, and that is how he is referred to throughout the narrative; we are left in the dark as to his first name. His last name is unsurprisingly Iseka, as everybody living in Technocracy has the same last name. There is a similar situation in the neighbouring Soria, where every inhabitant’s last name is Soria.