Roberto Bolano and Julio
Cortozar (As well as Gabriel Garcia Marquez) are to Latin American writers what
Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison are to black writers. For better or worse, any
new book by someone who shares their ethnicity is bound to be compared to them
even with a modicum of thematic similarities. While I have not read any Julio
Cortozar, I am a huge Bolano fan, and the only similarities The Revolutionaries
Try Again; the debut novel of Ecuadorian writer Mauro Javier Cardenas has with
Bolano’s novel The Savage Detectives is it two central male characters and
their shaky relationship. This is more of a modernist work of vibrant and
intense innovation that left me a little breathless but undeniably impressed.
It’s a tough read, not unlike the books by the authors mentioned, but one I found
rewarding and thought provoking. It is quite the task to unpack such a novel,
but I will do my best. While the back of the book says that there are three
central characters, there are really only two. One, the person whose story
takes up the most page space is Antonio, an ex-apt living in San Francisco who
gets a call from his old school chum Leopoldo, a government worker still living
in their hometown of Guayaquil. Leo has a plan to overthrow the government,
which exists in a state of comfortable corruption and under the ghost and
possible threat of violent revolution. It is hard to pin down what this books
thematic heart is. Is it the futility of revolution? Is it about the finite
passion for it that deprecates with age? Or is it about age itself, and the
disappointments that invariably come with growing old? It’s probably somewhere
in between, but this novel, with its acidic language and unconventional
structure, which layers timelines, thoughts and feelings on top of each other,
is sure to get your blood flowing.
Rating: 4/5
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