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language: Spanish
country: Argentina
year: 1979
form: novel, short fiction
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 14.1.23-20.1.23
Angélica Gorodischer’s Trafalgar is a collection of linked short fiction where in the title character, the somewhat picaresque merchant Trafalgar Medrano, has coffee with friends in Rosario and tells them about his occasionally improbable adventures with interstellar trade.
most of the stories involve Trafalgar visiting a high-concept sci-fi society — a world where, due to the influence of a comet, the dead walk (and attempt force the living never to change, to keep things as they were when they were alive); a world whose inhabitants, millennia ago, achieved a kind of enlightenment and abandoned speech, writing, everything but a kind of ecstatic music and dance; a world where all times are present simultaneously, but only for offworld visitors, who find themselves in a new timeframe each day. they’re told in the familiar language of everyday Argentine speech as Trafalgar downs coffee after coffee (despite his complaints that the main narrator, implied to be a version of Gorodischer, brews her coffee too weak).
I liked it a lot conceptually. I could have done without the machismo but that’s part of Trafalgar’s character. some of the stories strayed into troublingly colonial territory (there’s a certain early Le Guin vibe to it), as I noted previously. mainly the emphasis on difference, especially the contrast between the ordinariness of Trafalgar’s encounters with his interlocutors and the radical difference of the worlds he visits, just made me want to reread Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand again.
the highlights, I think, were the all-times story (“El mejor día del año”), the walking dead story (“La lucha de la familia González por un mundo mejor”; conceptually impeccable even if the execution was a little underwhelming), and “Trafalgar y Josefina”, which is bracketed from the rest of the novel(?) as “Intervalo con mis tías” and dedicated to Gorodischer’s aunts. it’s narrated by the narrator’s aunt Josefina, who doesn’t understand interstellar travel and so assumes that Trafalgar is telling her about a newly decolonized country in Africa or Asia (“Me parece que debe quedar cerca de la India”). it’s both charmingly ordinary and a clever satire of white/mestizo middle class social norms (and the casually colonial attitudes that go with them). I also was struck by the final story, “Trafalgar y yo”, which is only two paragraphs:
—Porque hay cosas que no se pueden contar —dijo Trafalgar ese día de tormenta—. ¿Cómo las decís? ¿Qué nombre les ponés? ¿Qué verbos usás? ¿Habrá un idioma apropiado para eso? No más rico, no más florido ¿sino que tenga en cuenta otras cosas? Estuve en un mundo sin nombre, cubierto de selvas y de pantanos, lleno de animales monstruosos que no me llevaban el apunte, y en un claro de la selva, en una casa de madera blanca con tela metálica en las ventanas y una veleta en la cumbrera, había un hombre sentado en la galería frente a una mesa tomando té. Me senté con él y sirvió té para mí. Después volví a casa. Eso es todo.
Empezó a llover. Un cascarudo se metió bajo una hoja de magnolia y una gota fría me golpeó en la frente.
I think — in spite of Jorge Sánchez’s dismissal of Opus dos — this is my least favorite of her books that I’ve read so far; Kalpa Imperial is just truly a masterpiece. Las Repúblicas was a wild ride (in a good way). for all its obviousness I found Opus dos to be nice and sharp. this was aesthetically interesting, with some great concepts (and some marred by colonialism), but it just didn’t quite do it for me the way the others did.
moods: adventurous, lighthearted, reflective