Fernando Flores’s Tears of the Trufflepig is an absurdist, surrealist novel that explores a future world along the South Texas border, a zone in which the government has legalized drugs, erected a third border wall, and employs “filtering technology” favored by criminal syndicates to revive extinct animals for the amusement of the top percent of the very wealthy.
At the novel’s opening, Esteban Bellacosa is meeting an Aranaña farmer, Tranquilino, about a machine. The Aranaña are an invented indigenous people, refugees from a southern Atlantic Ocean island that has been closed off from the rest of civilization for centuries, and as a character in the novel later puts it: “were assimilated the hard way into society.” The character goes on to philosophize: “Maybe the hard way is the only way we get assimilated. The original Aranaña now are all dead, and so is their culture, pretty much,” and the identity of the Aranaña becomes increasingly significant as the novel progresses.
Tranquilino mentions that the Mexican police have found the crime boss El Gordo Pacheco dead, along with his family. All were eaten by Pacheco’s ostriches. Pacheco is a legendary figure whose sordid and strange work history provides the starting point for much of the novel’s storytelling. Pacheco had started as a gang leader, but after a world food shortage that decimated a fifth of the world’s population, he developed a new way to make money.
In response to the food shortage, scientists had developed filtering technology, a means to speed up the growth of produce and animals. Pacheco took the scientists who understood filtering technology to a mountain lab where they would duplicate and filter extinct animals to be sold to rich enthusiasts and collectors. Three criminal syndicates vied for control. The violence related to filtering causes “perceptions on what defines a living being shift, definitions” to change; world leaders enact international laws specifying that the filtering sciences can only be used to harvest vegetables and fruit.
Bellacosa has lived in a border town avoiding the dangerous trafficking syndicates. However, he is pulled into the underworld when a muckraking investigative reporter, Paco Herbert, invites him to an illicit dinner party that Herbert is covering for a story. The dinner features illegal dishes made from dead exotic animals for the dining pleasure of the wealthy. Diners feast on Galapagos Gumbo, the most coveted black market dish, while baby chick dodos runs around the aquarium.
At the dinner party is Porgy, the titular Trufflepig – a hooved animal that looks like a dark green pig with tiny ears, but who behaves like a dog and has a beak for a mouth. The Trufflepig is an animal deity from the mythology of the Aranaña people; it’s an animal that, like the phoenix, has never actually existed. When Bellacosa pets Porgy, her tears are milky, indicating her liking of Bellacosa.
The mystery that propels the second half of the book is Paco Herbert’s question: “What the fuck was the Trufflepig?” The pig is associated with the Aranaña, who believed reality and dreams were one and the same. Herbert thinks “If this world and our dreams were really one and the same, then what were the dreams we experienced in sleep? What was this world we called reality?”
The novel unfolds in cinematic detail, but only truly gets going after the illicit dinner, about a third of the way into the book. In the dinner party scene, Flores’s full talents for humor and surrealism are on display, and these are rare, remarkable talents akin to those possessed by Roberto Bolaño. Throughout, the novel is full of surprising circumstances, many of which are conveyed in embedded or nested stories, a character offhandedly telling another character a story that further builds the world, though it may not build the plot. For example, in a minor bit, when an opera singer denounces the fur of filtered animals in the world and a black market dish made out of an extinct bird, he and his entourage are found dead in pieces in an opera truck. Like a lot of oral storytelling, these embedded stories are full of thrills and violence, the better to keep the reader engaged.
And on a more cerebral level, the novel engages in a trenchant but often humorous critique of colonialism, immigration policy, and the 1%, with eerie parallels to our existing political discourse. Borders walls have been built. Instead of Border Patrol, there are Border Protectors. Even more disturbingly, the syndicates lop off the heads of Indians, shrink them and sell them for exorbitant prices: “[a] price tag is now placed on every Indian’s head to be mounted and encased, turned into conversation pieces at fancy cocktail parties thrown by rich, trendy circles, calling themselves aficionados of the arts and of ancient cultures.” In the fictional search for the latest “exotic” culinary extravaganza, we can see the super-wealthy of our own society continuing to feast on species that are going instinct. Flores manages to produce from this disturbing similarity, a narrative that is hilarious and wonderfully weird, rather than scolding.
A reader who is into the sociopolitical critique of the Tears of the Trufflepig, more so than its elaborate, baroque, and beautiful worldbuilding, might wish that more effort was spent on developing the plot of the satire – the narrative in the first third especially can feel desultory, a gifted author feeling his way in the dark towards an ending unknown to him. And there are moments that would have more dramatic punch in scene, but are related in an offhand way in summary. For example, when Bellacosa gives a hitchhiker a ride, and it turns out to be his brother, he realizes it’s his brother Oswaldo, who he hasn’t seen in years, and this is told to us in summary, which seems an odd choice for what should be a dramatic, developed moment.
In Flores’s short story “The Performance of Lillian Krauze” from his debut short story collection Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas, the character Liliana makes an art piece intending to capture “the spirit of the entire world” and within it are the flags of every nation, including extinct animals like dodo birds. She calls the piece “Dodo Birds Were the First Dadaists.” A similar Dadaist spirit and hijinks penetrates Tears of the Trufflepig, but to leave it at pure absurdism or pure ridicule is to miss its critical perspective, which is smart but latent, rather than spoon-fed to the reader. The dodo lived on Mauritius and became extinct during the Dutch colonization of the island, and so the extinct animals of the novel, such as the dodo chicks running around the aquarium during the dinner party, are not just random extinct animals, but are also symbols of what has been lost from indigenous culture as a result of empire. The fictional criminal filtering technology that serves the super-wealthy can be understood as a form of appropriation; a tendency within capitalism for the powerful to destroy an indigenous expression of culture, and then later profit and perform that same expression.
The overarching effects of Tears of the Trufflepig suggest a contemporary punk analog to Roberto Bolaño’s Infrarealist movement in poetry— an anti-bourgeois movement in which “Even the heads of aristocrats can be our weapons.” Flores’s sentences are vivid and lively, and the vision is tremendous, psychedelic, blazing. Readers in search of the delights of hallucinatory language and humor and radical thinking will find in Tears of the Trufflepig pure pleasure.
[Published May 14, 2019 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 336 pages, $16.00 paperback original]