Review: "Affections" By Rodrigo Hasbun

Reading Affections, the English language debut of Bolivian author Rodrigo Hasbun is one of those total joys you get when you go out of your way to read a writer who is either fresh or new or from a totally different area of the world (and in most cases, the book fits perfectly into both of those types of descriptions). It is a new book from an author unfamiliar to those in America and with a few blurbs from authors such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Andres Neuman and Adam Haslett to draw readers in; those who take the plunge with this new face in English fiction will be greatly rewarded. It is a brief plunge though, since the book is only 132 pages long, but I know time is precious to some, but this little book is totally worth it. It is easy to see why one of the blurbs on the back cover compared it favorably to Roberto Bolano. What it lacks in the size and scope of what I think are the two cornerstones of his legacy (The Savage Detectives and 2666), it did make me fondly recall his smaller works such as By Night in Chile and Distant Star (which this book is superior to). Like those, it crams a lot of drama, action and emotion into a tiny space that you can finish in a single day if you wanted too and feel like you have experienced a fully thought out story without any filler. The book tells the fictionalized story of Hans Ertl, who was the cameraman for Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. After the war, he and his family move to Bolivia, and Hans’s untethered spirit manifests itself in his hunt for the lost city of Paititi. And while the expedition to find that city is at the heart of this novel, it is really not the focus of the book’s events. Instead, what this book is more interested in are the stories of his three daughters and the different paths their lives take. Monika, the oldest that inherited her father’s reckless spirit, Heidi, whose romantic obsessions lead only to disappointment and Trixi, whose contentment hides a deep seeded loneliness and a rock lined path to regret and disappointment. Told in alternating chapters, which focus on different individuals in the story, including Reinhard, whose shares Monika’s thirst for social change but who is never able to reach her heart and Inti, a political prisoner whose section only becomes important as the book goes on, whose life is destined to be short and legendary, the novel tells a dark story about desires unmet or gone sour, the real reasons for why people join revolutions and those we sometimes have to hurt in order to obtain a sliver of happiness. I am struggling to find the heart of this book because so many memorable sections seem to hold within them deep truths about what the book is trying to say. This is a large hearted epic of a novel disguised as something small from a writer I hope to hear more from in the future.

Rating: 5/5