The most recent novel by Sergio Ramírez (Masatepe, Nicaragua, 1942), 2017 Miguel de Cervantes Prize winner, is titled El caballo dorado, “the golden horse,” which ends up being a beautifully carved and painted wooden rocking horse leading the herd of horses on a carousel. The main character is Princess María Aleksándrovna, a down-on-her-luck princess who is often said to be crippled and needs to use “a splint with countersunk screws and cowhide straps on her left leg” to walk. Her father is a drunk who plays L’Hombre every night with his employees and everyday loses what little inheritance he received. “Now nothing remains of the old property other than a few desyatinas of pasture at the foot of the crag, where María Aleksándrovna herds a smaller flock of goats and sheep.” At the first opportunity, the princess runs away with the town barber, Anatoli Florea, wooden rocking-horse carver and presumed inventor of the carousel that will fascinate the masses by the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, “on the slatted posts in front of his door there is a golden horse strung up, carved out of birch, its mane in the wind, its head defiant, its lips enlarged, and its front legs poised to move forward or to jump from the void below its hooves.”

As often happens in Ramírez’s novels, the course of narration provides an investigation into the matter, utilizing a wide variety of documents, letters, articles, police reports, imaginary scenes, and even anonymous accounts of dubious veracity. One section of chapter two presents us with an article titled “Anatoli Florea, inventor of the carousel?” which happens to be chapter seven of the book Documented History of the Carrousel, published in the United Kingdom in 1936. Thus we find out that the carousel had already been invented, which does not diminish the talents of Anatoli, who in his notebooks (one with blue covers and another with black covers) wrote down all the details about the construction, mechanisms, and design of his carousel. El caballo dorado is also a metafiction of the art of storytelling. In chapter one, the princess compares the version of “Little Red Riding Hood” told by the castle’s kitchen maid with the version told by Perrault that she reads in a book her father bought her. This serves as a preface for readers, foreshadowing that, in the process of reading, we will find ourselves confronted by different versions of stories, with contradictory facts and with betrayals that compel us to read with suspicion.

El caballo dorado is one of the more scholarly, detailed, and meticulous novels by Sergio Ramírez, an author whose work stands out for its structural complexity, linguistic wealth, innovation, and diversity. Since his first novel, Tiempo de fulgor (1970), Ramírez has proven to be a complex narrator, willing to lift the curtains of his storytelling to force the reader to read closely, to look at the text again, to reread between the lines and discern what is going on. However, he has also proven to be extremely interested in the reality of diegesis, in the details, in the smells that circulate through the atmosphere and in the brands of products. It is therefore wonderful to delve into this novel that begins in Romania in the nineteenth century and admire the documentary richness the author handles, the proliferation of bibliographic references he reveals, or the casual way in which he mentions a fact and later confirms it with a quote or bibliographic reference. Consider, for example, in chapter one, when he speaks about Prince Aleksándr Vasílievich Korchak, María’s father, and quotes Elinor Barber’s book, The Slavic Countryside Nobility (1898), to demonstrate that being a prince is not such a big deal. The title was used to designate a certain peasant landowner class, and not necessarily a powerful person in line for the throne. He finishes off this explanation by quoting Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s novels, where “we find mountain princes at every step”.

“The narrator of El caballo dorado is quite conscious of his role as narrator and at certain moments he interrupts the plot to make metanarrative notes or remarks about the events”

If anything, this book may be overly encyclopedic and elaborate. The author has mentioned in interviews the example of the art of painting carousel horses, and especially that of obtaining the particular stain for the golden horse. “The glowing gold that comes from potassium cyanide” is the section where he explains how to achieve that tone, as detailed by Anatoli in his black rubber-covered notebook. Potassium cyanide is also the poison destined for the princess that ends Anatoli’s life and dreams of being the inventor of the carousel. The research that the novel entails is overwhelming, above all in the world of the first part, which is perhaps unknown and distant to Latin American readers. In chapter six, he mentions all the names that have been used for the carousel, he describes all the necessary pieces to build a carousel, and in chapter seven we find an addendum to the list of parts.

The narrator of El caballo dorado is quite conscious of his role as narrator and at certain moments he interrupts the plot to make metanarrative notes or remarks about the events. In the novel, we often find sections whose origin is not clearly identified, printed in a smaller font than the normal text. For example, the section titled “Heated Pursuit,” which is composed of four fragments, we read as part of the novel until the end, when we learn that it is a narrative that occurs in the mind of Vasili Ciprian, Prince Aleksánder’s employee, who has gradually been winning all his holdings from him in their L’Hombre games. Ramírez draws on a wide variety of narrative texts, from intercepted letters, police reports, historical texts, Giuseppe Tartini’s dream (in which he makes a deal with the devil), and the booklet of Mexican Julio Sedano (who claims to be the son of emperor Maximilian I), to Colombian poet Julio Flórez’s testimony and an article by Francisco Huezo.

The last part of the book takes place in Nicaragua in 1910, where María Aleksándrovna arrives at the request of President José Santos Zelaya to set up the carousel that so fascinates people in Europe. Because of this, the carousel ends up touring many of the country’s cities and towns, at fairs and festivals of patron saints, already in a disastrous state, “the golden steed’s mane broken, the roses on the chipped horse collars beyond repair, and more than a few others replaced by fiberglass animals.”

El caballo dorado is another excellent novel by Sergio Ramírez, where he once again proves to be a master of the narrative art, having an excellent command of his prose and a vast descriptive ability. In an age where prosaism is all the rage and messy realism prevails, this novel displays a rich and elegant style, renewing the commitment to making literature exemplary, entertaining, and valuable.

Translated by Jared Peterson

The most recent novel by Jacinta Escudos (El Salvador 1961) returns to one of her favorite topics: death. The novel only has two actant or protagonists, a woman called Rolanda Herter and a man, Blake Sorrow. Like most of Escudos’s characters, they are both maladjusted, difficult, and quite eccentric beings. Roberta wants to die but does not have the courage to commit suicide, which is why she has to hire someone to kill her. Blake works in a parking garage and follows an extremely strict and boring routine until Rolanda shows up at the parking lot and asks him unexpectedly to kill her. Blake, of course, is left speechless in the face of such a request, but the woman insists. It was pouring and Rolanda invites him to get into the car to go for a cup of coffee. So begins a kind of friendship between the two.

Jacinta Escudos became known with Cuentos sucios [Dirty stories] (1997) where she reveals her critical view of society, family conventions, marriage, and romantic relationships. In 2002 her novel A-B-Sudario [A-B-Shroud] was awarded the Mario Monteforte Toledo Central American Novel Prize. She published El diablo sabe mi nombre [The devil knows my name] in 2008 and Crónicas para sentimentales [Chronicles for the sentimental] in 2010. In El asesino melancólico [The melancholy assassin], Escudos returns to a theme that preoccupies her as she shows us in Rolanda, a woman going through her second divorce. Her first divorce didn’t affect her much, however the second one has been catastrophic for her, surprising, because she thought they were happy, and it plunged her into a state of suicidal depression.

As for Blake, he is a failed man, alone, without money, without a career, without a personality, without ambitions, that is to say, an apathetic and depressed individual, without a goal in life. In a way, Blake is also a typical character of Jacinta Escudos, representing all the frustration and disappointment of a person who does not meet society’s expectations. Blake rejects himself as well as his environment. He lives in a small room above a laundromat and the smell of soap invades his life every day. A smell he hates, as he hates the landlord and practically all the people around him. Although he worked for a while as an accountant, he did countless other small jobs to earn a living, but none brought him pleasure, until he found work as a parking attendant. What he liked most about this job was that he didn’t have to talk to anyone, he simply had to collect the parking fees from the customers who didn’t even look him in the eye. Even though Blake’s life was completely pointless, he didn’t want to die. When we come across him in the novel, he is 50 years old and worries about the things he still has not done in life, the lack of meaning in his actions, and the importance of his deeds. Despite all this, he doesn’t think about dying or committing suicide.

Here, then, a contrast is made between Rolanda, who appears to be an upper-middle class woman, and Blake, who lives in poverty. After her husband Robert Herter filed for divorce, Rolanda had been going to the parking garage for twenty-three days where Blake worked. She’d park and remain silent, not do anything, not even talk to Blake. Blake would ignore her; he didn’t want to establish any kind of contact or relationship with a woman that was clearly somewhat crazy.

The entire novel is written in the third person and narrated by an omniscient and extradiegetic narrator, but starting in chapter four we have access to the letters Rolanda writes to Blake, which give us a lot of information about her personal life and her daily routine. From then on, they begin to have conversations that revolve mainly around death. Blake refuses to take part in a murder, insisting that he isn’t a murderer, that he doesn’t have experience with such things and that he probably wouldn’t do it right. She tries to convince him and explains how easy it is to kill another person. The letters become increasingly frequent and little by little Blake derives a certain joy from them. After work he goes to his room and reads with great enthusiasm the letter that Rolanda has given him that afternoon. Finally, Rolanda offers to pay him to kill her and Blake begins to consider the idea; he thinks about what he can do with the money and how it can change his life.

Upon learning that Rolanda likes Moroccan sardines, Blake begins to eat them too. We see then that there is a closeness that develops between the two characters through food, and the act of eating becomes a metaphor of what begins uniting these two lonely people. When Rolanda gives Blake an envelope full of money, it seems the two have come to an agreement.  Blake begins to change his modest habits and allows himself small pleasures that were previously unattainable. One afternoon, Blake tells her that he wants them to go to the beach. They eat oysters at a beachfront restaurant and talk about different things. Blake intends to end the relationship and return the money. He plans to quit his job so she can no longer find him. However, after they have finished eating, she gets up and walks towards the water. Blake follows her. She takes the gun out of her purse, they struggle, a shot is fired and Rolanda dies.

Blake moves to another city and lives an anonymous, quiet, and very modest life; nevertheless, he cannot stop thinking about Rolanda’s death. Until one day someone knocks on his door. The police have finally found him; they charge him; the witnesses testify against him, the waiter who served them at the restaurant identifies him, and he’s sentenced to 30 years in prison. For Blake, his life is over; he believes he will not be able to survive in prison, mainly because of the lack of privacy and having to constantly share with other prisoners. The novel thus reveals the tragedy of a world of lonely, failed people who wish to die in the absence of true dreams and motivations. It also speaks to the cowardice of human beings who take their own lives and of fortuitous accidents, of things that should not happen, but do, and which we can never prevent. This new novel by Jacinta Escudos confirms her great worth as a storyteller and above all her attentive look at society’s contradictions, loneliness, and failure. Those interested can follow her articles, blogs, and videos at https://jescudos.com/.

Nicasio Urbina
University of Cincinnati

Translated by Isabel González-Gutiérrez
Middlebury Institute of International Studies

Nicasio Urbina received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University. He works on literary criticism of contemporary Spanish American literature, with emphasis in Central American literature and culture. He has particular interest in genre theory, semiotics, and narratology. He has taught seminars on the Latin American novel, the short story, Central American literature, creative writing, as well as thematic courses such as humor, myth, and violence in Spanish American literature. He has published eight books of literary criticism, short stories, and poetry; and has edited eight books on different topics. Has published 91 articles of literary criticism, and 122 conferences and papers. In 2015 he received the Rieveschl Award for Creative and Scholarly Work.

Isabel González-Gutiérrez is an MA student in Spanish translation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. She has a BA in Political Science from San Francisco State University and four years of experience working as a community interpreter and translator.

Tiempos recios. Mario Vargas Llosa. Barcelona: Alfaguara, 2019.

Mario Vargas Llosa’s new novel Tiempos recios [Fierce times], published by Alfaguara in 2019, tells the story of the 1954 coup that deposed Jacobo Árbenz from the Guatemalan presidency. Like all that he has written, this is a very well-narrated novel, but without the structural complexity that he has deployed in other novels like The Green House (1966) or Conversation in the Cathedral (1969). It is fairly linear, with chapters of various lengths following the story’s narrative thread without digressions or narrative intricacies. In that sense, it is an easy book to read, stylistically and linguistically simple. It is not a novel that shows off grand narrative feats. Instead, it seeks to present political and historical perspective. Tiempos recios works to show how the governments of Juan José Arévalo, and Jacobo Árbenz after him, were not Communist, but truly democratic. How they sought to modernize Guatemala and build up strong, democratic institutions like those in the United States—to raise the quality of life for indigenous Guatemalans, and the vast majority of Guatemalans who owned no land and had no access to education or healthcare. He shows how the United States committed a grave error in supporting the interests of the United Fruit Company and a handful of landlords at the expense of the vast majority of Guatemalans.

The United States and some historians seek to cast the 1954 invasion of Guatemala as one more fight in the context of the Cold War, waged to prevent the Soviet Union from gaining a foothold in the Americas. Of course, Mario Vargas Llosa is well known for his conservative views—he would call them liberal—and his opposition to socialism and international Communism. He has criticized Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and the current government of Mexico. In this work, he posits that the United States betrayed its own democratic principles, the very essence of its form of government, when it brought down the government of Jacobo Árbenz. I would go so far as to say that this novel is a thesis with the principle object of laying out a political position, not a true work of art that changes the course of Latin American narrative.

The first chapter is dedicated to the United Fruit Company and its founder, Sam Zemurray, perhaps the most powerful man in Central America during the twentieth century. A very controversial figure, he controlled ports, railroads, enormous banana plantations, and banks. He chose—and removed—politicians and presidents. This section tells of his friendship with Edward L. Bernays, whom he contracted as a publicist to change the image of the United Fruit Company in the United States and the rest of the world. The entire first chapter provides historical information, a sort of introduction with the heading “Before” that opens the door to the rest of the novel. Next come the first chapter where we enter directly into fiction. We read the story of a woman, a female character. We will come to know her as Miss Guatemala; her full name is Martita Borrero Parra. Martita is a little girl at the beginning of the novel, then a young woman, and then a grown woman with plenty of relationships with politicians and powerful men. Finally, she is an elderly woman, ending the novel in the last chapter with an interview with the author, Mario Vargas Llosa. This climax is entitled “After”; thus, the novel begins before and ends after, with 32 chapters in between comprising the story of the United States’ invasion of Guatemala.

On another level, we can say that the novel is about how men abuse a woman. They are generally older men in positions of power, taking advantage of a young girl, then of an unprotected young woman in a risky situation, and finally of a woman that feels endangered and obliged to trust a powerful man. The novel moves within the modern current of the “#MeToo Movement”, denouncing how men abuse their power for sex. We could say that it is a very contemporary novel, and, in that sense, current. Mario Vargas Llosa comments upon one of the most hotly debated and important themes of the moment in which we are living. He oscillates between these two: the nature of the invasion orchestrated by the United States and the CIA against Guatemala, and violence against women. By painting a picture of reality in Guatemala in the mid-twentieth century, he tangentially touches upon the situation in the Dominican Republic and that of its dictator, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, a reality that he knows very well and that he masterfully presented in his novel The Feast of the Goat (2000). In this manner, Vargas Llosa reveals the situation in Guatemala in 1954: a struggle for power between the government of the October Revolution, the laws that Jacobo Árbenz was trying to pass, and the liberating army of Carlos Castillo Armas, who launches his campaign to depose Árbenz from Honduras with the support of the United States. In turn, he imprisons hundreds, tortures them, kills them, and forces many to seek political asylum in embassies. Castillo Armas undoes many of the Jacobo Árbenz’s government’s achievements, returning the United Fruit Company to its privileged perch and establishing anew a classist, racist, reactionary regime in Guatemala.

The novel’s third theme is strongmen, the psychology of power, and the personality of a dictator like Rafael Leónidas Trujillo or Carlos Castillo Armas. The author seems to be interested in exploring the unique sort of admiration these characters inspire, how the people who work for them relate to one another, and the varying sorts of dependence that exist between iron-fisted dictators like Trujillo and men who rise to power with the help of the United States. Men like Castillo Armas, who has neither the charm nor the strength nor the ability to instill respect like the Dominican dictator. Simultaneously, we have a character like Abbes García, who goes from being a small and insignificant horse race reporter to strategizing Trujillo’s national security, specializing in all classes of torture and building up a system of terror that would allow Trujillo to keep total control over the Dominican Republic, all while maintaining an enormous influence in the Caribbean and Central America. He is a character who, even after he flees in the aftermath of Trujillo’s death, feels happy about having served such a man, even though his hands are awash with blood. This novel is apropos, touching the same tribulations that afflict Latin America in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Nicasio Urbina
University of Cincinnati

Translated by Michael Redzich

Nicasio Urbina received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University. He works on literary criticism of contemporary Spanish American literature, with emphasis in Central American literature and culture. He has particular interest in genre theory, semiotics, and narratology. He has taught seminars on the Latin American novel, the short story, Central American literature, creative writing, as well as thematic courses such as humor, myth, and violence in Spanish American literature. He has published eight books of literary criticism, short stories, and poetry, and has edited eight books on different topics. Has published 91 articles of literary criticism, and 122 conferences and papers. In 2015 he received the Rieveschl Award for Creative and Scholarly Work.

Michael Redzich is currently studying law at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He gratuated from the University of Oklahoma in 2017 with a BA in Spanish and a BA in Letters. His interest in Latin American literature sprouted early in his Spanish education, but grew considerably during his time in Buenos Aires, where he lived from 2014-2016. Michael was one of the first OU undergraduate students to become involved with LALT, and he continues to work with the journal as a translator and editor at large.

Ya nadie llora por mí. Sergio Ramírez. Madrid: Alfaguara. 2017. 356 pages.

In his most recent novel, Sergio Ramírez (Nicaragua, 1942), Ya nadie llora por mí [No one cries for me anymore], returns to the crime novel genre with Inspector Dolores Morales, protagonist of his previous crime novel, El cielo llora por mí [The sky cries for me] (2009). Sergio Ramírez, who recently won the Cervantes Prize, the most important prize in the Spanish language, now gives us a novel that is surprising in its use of popular, at times vulgar, language that represents Nicaraguan street speech. Sergio Ramírez has been characterized for his novels of great structural complexity such as ¿Te dio miedo la sangre? [Did the blood frighten you?] (1978), by the quality of his prose such as Castigo divino [Divine Punishment] (1988), for the intelligent development of characters such as Margarita, está linda la mar [Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea] (Alfaguara Prize 1998), and for his ability to imitate the language of different social strata and different countries, such as the dialect of the Costa Rican middle class in La fugitiva [The fugitive] (2011). Because of this, it is not surprising that in this novel the use of Nicaraguan popular language, at times rude, since as I postulate in this review, the novel intends to represent the language of the streets of Managua, the popular speech of the poor neighborhoods of the city, and the language of the lumpen proletariat.

In Ya nadie llora por mí, we are faced with a case of domestic abuse, truly a serious problem in Nicaragua, in Latin America, and to a large extent, in the world in general. Marcela is a young girl who suffers sexual abuse by her stepfather, Miguel Soto Colmenares, multimillionaire business owner, very known in the country for enterprises in diverse areas. Soto has hired the Morales company of private investigations to search for his stepdaughter. From the beginning of the novel, the reader suspects that it is about a case of sexual abuse, by this we can say that the novel is not original nor surprising. As readers, we can anticipate what will come next which in some way ruins the novel. Especially for the readers familiar with the history of Nicaragua, this case refers us to the accusation of sexual abuse that the stepdaughter of dictator Daniel Ortega, Zoilamérica Narváez Murillo, aired in mass media and in national and international courts in 1998. Clearly, we are faced with a case in which fiction copies reality. Although the plot of the novel is neither very surprising nor original, I believe the novel is valuable since the novelist set out to recreate the situation of a corrupt society, polarized between religious preachers, bought politicians, and vulgarly rich businessmen. The popular language, rude and vulgar, that the people of Nicaragua typically use in their conversations makes up part of this mural that the novel presents us. Many of the characters of this novel are people from the working class, some are Sandinista leaders, others are garbage workers, helpless and drug addicted, and the author has attempted to reflect this social class with Nicaraguan speech in his novel.

Another very interesting thing we observe in Ya nadie llora por mí is the presence of a conversational partner that is constantly dialoguing with the characters, without him being a living character in the novel. I am referring to Lord Dixon, character of the previous novel, El cielo llora por mí and who dies in this story. In this sequel, Ramírez pays him a sort of homage through the offstage voice that is constantly conversing with us readers, preserving the things that the characters say. This is a very interesting and unique function, since the characters like Morales or his assistant Sofia, do not listen to the commentaries that Lord Dixon makes. We, the readers, are the only ones who listen to his constant presence throughout the novel.

Ya nadie llora por mí plays with different narrative planes and social classes. On one hand, we have Marcela’s family that is one of the richest families in Nicaragua, her father Miguel Soto reminds the narrator “a Gianni Agnelli, el difunto magnate de la Fiat” [of Gianni Agnelli, the deceased Fiat magnate] (24). His first encounter will be in Miguel Soto’s mansion, where the breakfast menu is printed every day for the master to pick what we will order, as if it were a restaurant. This level of luxury and abundance is contrasted by the poorer and more deprived classes of Nicaraguan society, the glue-sniffing children, the hungry, the marginalized that eat each day in a home of mercy. We also have a character like the Rey de los Zopilotes [King of the Vultures], a Sandinista who has control over the garbage business, who has a trained vulture as a pet, and who has made himself a man with certain economic resources and power. Lieutenant Fajardo represents police force, corrupt to the service of the dictatorship, and of course we can not forget comrade Rosario Murillo, wife of dictator Ortega and vice-president of the republic by decree. In the novel she appears under the name of Sai Baba, and Lieutenant Fajardo calls her to request her authorization to carry out certain interrogations.

If in his previous novels, Sergio Ramírez had resorted to email, in Ya nadie llora por mí we find Twitter as one of the protagonists, most of all toward the end of the novel, when in a press conference in the Nicaraguan Center for Human rights, Marcela announces the rape during which she was victimized at the hands of her father. This, then, is a novel very contemporary with regards to the element that compose it, rooted firmly in the historic reality of the current Nicaragua, and novel in terms of the narrative device of the offstage voice of a dead character. The police genre has served Sergio Ramírez to demonstrate the corruption and the low depths and of the upper bourgeoisie of Nicaragua, as in its middle class, and its proletariat underclass. Ya nadie llora por mí is without a doubt a good novel, one that both reads easily and entertains, but I would not classify it among Sergio Ramírez’s best novels.

Nicasio Urbina.
University of Cincinnati

Translated by Auston Stiefer

La noche de la usina. 

The new novel by Eduardo Sacheri (Buenos Aires, 1967)—prospectively titled The Night of the Heroic Losers in English—which was awarded the Premio Alfaguara 2016, takes us to the Argentine crisis of 2001, when the government of Fernando de la Rúa imposed a set of economic restrictions known as the Corralito¹ and thousands of Argentines lost access to their savings. It is, therefore, a novel of the crisis of neoliberalism, the savagery of capitalism, and the shady financial dealings that allow a small group to take advantage of the majority and get rich quick. It’s a novel about economic ambition and the human obsession with accumulating wealth.

The novel’s action takes place in a town called O’Connor, near General Villegas, in the province of Buenos Aires, just where the Pampas begin. It’s a little town full of simple people, where everyone knows everyone else and there are no secrets. The novel’s story is rooted in this small-town context, where a banker and an unscrupulous businessman steal the savings of a group of lower-middle-class men who want to make a deal that would benefit their town. The main character is Fermín Perlassi, who was a soccer player in his youth before going to Buenos Aires to play for a city team and later returning to his hometown. With the money he earned in the capital, he bought a gas station and earned his living peacefully, minding his business with his wife and son.

The novel is written in a conversational style, narrated in the third person by an omniscient narrator who shows obvious affection for the novel’s poor characters. The narrator often uses phrases indicating doubt, beginning with “let’s say,” “maybe,” “perhaps,” etc. That is to say, the narrator speaks in a somewhat uncertain tone, as if he were not completely sure of what he was telling, or as if he were trying to understand the events as he narrates them. This gives the novel an air of familiarity, a sense of interpersonal confidence, as if we were sitting together in a café listening to the author himself tell us the story. Sacheri is known for his novel La pregunta de sus ojos [The question in their eyes] (2005), which Juan José Campanella reimagined on film as El secreto de sus ojos [The Secret in Their Eyes] (2009), going on to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2010.

The businessman, Fortunato Manzi, is a lively and successful character who takes advantage of any opportunity to make money. Among his various business ventures is a gas station situated near the entrance to town by the side of a new highway; thanks to this location, his gas station claims much of Perlassi’s business. Manzi, conspiring with Alvarado, the bank manager, claims the dollars that Perlassi and his friends deposited while they were buying La Milagrosa, an abandoned factory, whose silos they want to use to store their grains. On that very weekend, the Argentine government declares the Corralito, and on Monday the men wake up to the news that they can’t get their money out of the bank. A few months later, they realize that Manzi has built a vault out in the countryside in which to store their dollars, and the six honest men go through many hardships to get their money back.

Fermín Perlassi’s wife is Silvia, a calm and caring woman who dies in a car accident on a morning when they are both out running errands. Silvia’s death destroys Perlassi, who never recovers from this pain. Although he is left with his son, Rodrigo, with whom he tries to establish a good relationship, Perlassi is almost a dead man: he has lost his money and his friends’ money, not to mention his wife. These somber events provide the complement to the tragedy that gives rise to the entire story. The only way Perlassi can redeem himself is by getting the money back.

Antonio Fontana is a close friend of Perlassi’s, and in his house he runs a “gomería”—a shop where he repairs wheels and tires. He is a devotee of Raúl Alfonsín, the former president of Argentina, and he is one of Perlassi’s key accomplices in the novel. Francisco Lorgio is the third main character: the owner of a transportation company, he is financially comfortable and he has a son named Hernán with whom he maintains a troubled relationship. Lorgio suffers from the sadness of the immigrant, the sadness he saw in his parents who emigrated from Italy and never managed to completely adapt to Argentina, a nostalgia with deep and heavy roots. The fourth member of this group of friends is Alfredo Belaúnde, the railway station manager, who drives a two-horsepower Citröen so old that all his friends laugh when he goes so far as to call it a car. Between the four friends and other town residents, they manage to pull together 242,000 dollars to invest in buying La Milagrosa, with its abandoned silos on the outskirts of town, so they can get them back in working order and save the grains from the upcoming harvest. Four friends, already getting on in age, plan to make a business deal that will simultaneously help local farmers to store their harvest and sell their crops.

There are few literary references in the novel. On page 94, when the friends are discussing the pit that Manzi dug in order to hide all their cash, Perlassi mentions the short story “Cavar un foso” [To dig a grave] by Adolfo Bioy Casares, included in the book El lado de la sombra [The side of the shadow] (1962). On page 331, Rodrigo, Fermín Perlassi’s son, references The Centurions, a novel by Jean Larteguy, but La noche de la usina is not a particularly literary novel. Like all of Sacheri’s work, it is a novel about human problems, designed to be read easily and understood by all of its readers. Neither is it a novel with many cinematographic references, but when Perlassi is thinking about how to rob the vault, he sits down to watch heist movies in search of ideas. The films he watches are pirated Hollywood movies, confiscated by the government and lent to him by a friend. In all respects, the novel is directed to a wide and general audience.

Perlassi and his friends don’t want to steal Manzi’s money; they want to recover what he stole from them. Their idea is to take their $242,000 and leave the rest, but, when the moment arrives – since things don’t go exactly according to plan – they leave with all the money in the vault, planning to return Manzi’s share. At the end of the novel, Hernán, Belaúnde’s son, disappears with the extra money. And so, we can say that the main theme of this novel is integrity, honesty, something that the Argentine government revealed itself to lack and something that is in short supply in our times.

This is also a novel about love and friendship. Rodrigo Perlassi, while pretending to be looking after the plants at Manzi’s office, falls in love with his secretary, Florencia, a very beautiful woman, but he never confesses his love for her. Many months pass, and in the novel’s epilogue he bumps into her on the street in La Plata, the city where he studies. At that moment, Florencia tells him that she is in love with him and they get together. But the true love story of the novel is the story of Fermín Perlassi and his wife, Silvia, which ends tragically in the car accident I mentioned above. Perlassi never gets over this tragedy, and the novel shows us a man who has lost everything, but who tries to find himself again through a sort of vengeance, bringing about justice for himself and his friends.

La noche de la usina is a novel with a relatively simple structure that is easy to read, interesting, and written in a commercial style like almost all the recipients of the Alfaguara Prize. At the same time, it impressively reflects the tragedy of a corrupt society in which a small group of honest men must try to defend themselves from falling victim to the savagery of capitalism.

Nicasio Urbina
University of Cincinnati

¹The Corralito, meaning “small enclosure” or “playpen,” was a measure implemented to stop a run on banks in Argentina. The measure limited the amount of money customers could withdraw from dollar-denominated accounts.

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