The Incompletes is a departure for the Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec. Or perhaps it’s just a variation on a favorite theme: the malleability of memory. The most literary of his novels, it openly plays with the concepts of perception, projection, and characterization. The narrator is only tangentially connected to the events he describes, most of which occur within the claustrophobic confines of an old hotel rather than the outdoor, urban landscapes Chejfec’s readers have come to associate with his work.
Chejfec has remained remarkably consistent in his approach to storytelling — at least in those books that have been translated into English. His novels are in dialogue with each other, all featuring unnamed, male narrators with a shared passion for walking. During their walks they sift through the past, reshaping memories through the simple act of retrieving them, often focusing on individuals from whom they’ve been separated by time and geography. In many cases, the landscape acts as another character, the exterior topography reflecting the interior journey. In My Two Worlds, an urbane, older writer who has received a troubling email linking to a bad review of his latest novel, goes for a walk in a park near his hotel. He is in a foreign city attending a literary conference. The park is unnamed but its features make it easily identifiable as Farroupilha Park in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The narrator of The Planets is a much younger man who wanders the same streets he did as a child, retracing past walks and haunted by his belief – an obsession, really – that a close friend who disappeared years before, a victim of Argentina’s terrible Dirty War, died only recently in an explosion he read about in the newspaper. The protagonist of The Dark is an altogether more sinister character than his predecessors, for whom walking seems to be a compulsion, taking him (and us) through garbage-strewn lots and industrial brown fields as he replays the disturbing history of his relationship with a pretty, young factory worker named Delia:
He remembered other walks, also endless. In Buenos Aires, when he used to roam the suburbs at dawn and everything seemed to belong to a dying world, or along the old canals of Manchester, which traced the melancholy web of a forgotten plain fallen out of circulation, populated by chimneys in disuse that had come to resemble taciturn geological formations. There were few places he’d gotten this feeling of having a territory expand as he crossed it. Many associate this experience with nature, or rather wide open spaces (the sea, flatlands, even interconnected valleys); for Felix, however, it was a condition specific to cities.
There are moments when these men appear to be the same person at different stages of life. Their preoccupations, Chejfec’s own. Until you realize that the foundation of memories that shapes each man’s character varies as wildly as the terrain they traverse. The Incompletes is Chejfec’s fourth novel published by Open Letter Books and his third translated by Heather Cleary. It is ostensibly about Felix, a friend of the narrator, who left Argentina decades before to take on “the ambiguous yoke, both brutal and enviable, barely visible yet indelible, of being an Argentinian in flight.” Our narrator has not forgotten the day he bid his friend farewell at the docks and, as the years pass, their tenuous connection is renewed by the appearance of a cryptic letter or faded postcard in his letterbox. But the experiences he recounts to us, apparently Felix’s, are filled with a level of detail that couldn’t be gleaned from an infrequent and flimsy correspondence.
The Incompletes is inspired by one such missive, taking up only half a sheet of hotel letterhead (the other half showing only Felix’s signature), sent from the Hotel Segado in Moscow. Obsessed with transitions and thresholds, seeing them as connections between past and present, their crossing setting into motion an endless loop of causalities, the narrator is particularly stirred by the hotel’s logo of “a partially open door”:
I remember that in the very first line, before summarizing his recent movements and tossing out an enigmatic quip, Felix announced, “The Hotel Salgado opened its doors to me.” I don’t know why, but I found it strange that the door opened to the left; this detail transformed a simple and forgettable logo into a mystery. I thought that any door left open so slightly, and in that direction, could only lead to a hidden place. I imagined the dark night and the city’s cold, empty streets, and in that innocent commercial drawing, I saw the sign of an imminent yet unlikely danger, as if a previous unknown order had decided to reveal itself without any prior indications or beliefs that might have served as a warning.
This is a fairly typical sampling of Chejfec’s prose. There’s no plot, per se, at least not in the traditional sense. Chejfec seems to be feeling his way, as intrigued by where these characters are going as his readers. Our narrator spends a great deal of space describing the maze of dingy hotel corridors that connect an endless inventory of rooms, all covered in dust and disappointment. The Hotel Segado is run by a woman named Masha, who is introduced to us as a secondary character and with whose emotional life our narrator also seems to have intimate knowledge of, despite the fact that she and Felix appear to barely interact. Rumored to be the illegitimate daughter of the hotel’s owner, she floats through the corridors, a small figure wrapped in layers of clothing, checking on long-vacant rooms and performing a myriad of small offices. She reminds one of a Domovoy, the household gods in old Russian folk tales. Her presence contributes to the “ominous mood” Felix senses at Hotel Salgado:
At some point, then, it occurred to me that Felix and Masha were like spirits, I don’t know what else to call them, artificial beings, characters so completely available they could be put together like makeshift dolls.
Chejfec’s narrative voices are always hesitant, slightly paranoid, and cagey with the facts. They are fond of semantics. Felix’s friend is no different: “I should say ‘I haven’t forgotten,’ rather than invoke memory.” Some parsing is required to get at the truth in what he is saying in his rambling inner monologues — what they lack in vigor they make up for in intellectual intensity. Readers are treated to a continuous stream of words and ideas, without chapter breaks. Like insomniacs settling into bed for the night, we see no respite ahead. The result is, intentionally, oppressive:
It occurs to him that, though it assumes different forms — like silences, murmurs, currents of air, banging, or desperation — panic is the sole language of the Hotel Salgado.
It all feels a bit like a ghost story until we leave the confines of the hotel walls and the vistas suddenly expand. Masha goes to do some shopping in the market and Felix decides to follow her, only to lose interest and go off exploring on his own. He ends up at the edge of the city, in what appears to be an abandoned residential complex, overlooking a giant crater. A child’s action figure stuck in the dirt and missing an arm calls to mind a photography exhibit Felix once visited. Among the many photographs of dead bodies that hung on the walls was one of “a half-buried man in a strange, almost vertical, position with his head and one arm raised, like a swimmer mid-stroke.” Yet another reference to the Dirty War, which looms large in Chejfec’s writing.
It is the enigmatic narrator, not without his charms, who ultimately connects the disparate elements and holds together the neural pathways of this cerebral novel. Fading into the background until, just when we’ve forgotten all about him, enmeshed as we are in the puzzling and imperfect existences of Felix and Masha, he springs up to reassert himself with some offhand remark. Reminding his readers exactly who is shaping this narrative.
“I will put it as Felix once did …”
“For Felix, appearances had an additional value …”
“Felix, however, does not remember this.”
“And so, just as Felix could have been someone else, an unfamiliar person, I could have been, too …”
Heather Cleary negotiates these switch-backs deftly, her familiarity with the author a real asset. Chejfec has professed a desire to write in “simple language,” but in practice he is a stylist who loves a labyrinthine sentence. Cleary helps readers to navigate the maze. When he makes his appearances, we immediately understand that the narrator is no longer transmitting the thought patterns of Felix or Masha, but his own. And this is as much a book about being the person who stayed behind on the docks as it is about the one who left.
[Published by Open Letter on September 24, 2019, 157 pages, $14.95 paperback]
Sergio Chejfec is currently the Distinguished Writer in Residence in the M.F.A. Creative Writing program in Spanish at NYU. According to his Wikipedia page, he has written 21 novels; the first was published in 1990. Only five are available in English.