In an interview, Carlos Fonseca states that while writing Austral he felt “it would be more interesting to think of a book not only as reaching out to a pre-existing archive but rather to imagine the task of a book as creating an archive: a set of images, of documents, of writings.” Fonseca succeeded in creating this archive, which resembles an escritoire with countless drawers, large and small, each containing a precious gem or another object that relates to a character, a story, or both. Besides historical events and stories, in this novel readers find photographs, notes and sketches that meld to create an intricate mosaic, a chronicle of human experience. Nature also plays a crucial role in Fonseca’s narrative. We encounter vast deserts, salt flats, the Amazon jungle, an American city covered in snow, a rustic theater built on the site where a village once existed. While people share their thoughts about the past in front of a microphone in this theater, birds fly in and out of pane-less windows.
As Fonseca points out, our identities are closely tied to language. Language helps us find meaning and defines who we are. Does speaking another language, rather than the one we first learned, change who we are? Are we different people when we speak different languages? Austral inspires these and other questions, including, what happens if we lose our language? Do we also lose memory of our past since language keeps us connected to it?
Language, the medium through which loss, art, and suffering are examined, takes center stage in the novel. Fonseca explores the language of photography, the landscape as language, philosophy, linguistics, and languages once spoken by native tribes, now extinct. Austral — the word chosen for the title in Spanish, as well as in Megan McDowell’s excellent English translation — has multiple meanings, including “the south, south wind, towards the dawn,” and aptly describes the ambiance in Humahuaca, the small Argentinian city where Fonseca’s novel begins.
The novel is divided into three parts, “A Private Language,” “Dictionary of Loss,” and “Theater of Memory” which all relate to language and to the meaning of words, as they encapsulate experience and remembering. It is through words, after all, through writing and speaking — and through its opposite, silence — that characters in Fonseca’s book deal with loss, memory, and the past.
In the first page of the book, Julio Gamboa, the main character, is studying the postcard of a black and white photograph. “He has never been in a desert before, but he has imagined them often,” Fonseca writes. “That’s why every time he looks at the postcard he now holds in his hands, his first instinct is to see in it a portrait of the arid plain.” Gamboa has a hard time figuring out what the image on the card actually represents: “He imagines tons of sand, the atmosphere of tedium, the feeling of emptiness … He sees the white drifts at the edges of the postcard and tells himself they are clouds. But then he starts to doubt.”
This introduction serves as a lens through which readers may approach Fonseca’s narrative and gain an understanding of Gamboa and of the worlds he’s about to discover. It also contains clues concerning secrets that will be revealed in due time, not only to Gamboa, but also to the reader as she follows Gamboa during his journey into the past.
A few lines down, we read: “Now he [Gamboa] is there, in the desert, but he keeps on staring at the same postcard … he turns the card over. The name on the piece and its photographer — Elevage de poussiére, Man Ray, 1920 — are crossed out with a fine red line. In their place she has written: Humahuaca, Argentina. A simple gesture that transforms the work.” Transformation, both personal and artistic, is an important theme in Fonseca’s novel.
According to the description in the Philadelphia Museum of Art website, the Man Ray photograph Julio has been studying “captures the accumulation of dust on Duchamp’s masterpiece, ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even'” and in English is titled “Dust Breeding.” The piece was created after Duchamp abandoned conventional painting “and set about inventing new ways of working as an artist.” Looking at the picture, it’s easy to comprehend why Gamboa would compare it to the desert. The last line in the last paragraph in this section, “And he thinks how strange it is to imagine a landscape when you finally have it in front of you” makes us wonder: Should we believe our imagination, our eyes, or both?
Julio Gamboa has traveled to Humahuaca after receiving a letter informing him of the death of Aliza Abravanel, a woman he met in Central America thirty years earlier and with whom he took a road trip before leaving for the United States to begin his university studies in Michigan, where he had a scholarship. Although Julio felt ambivalent about the scholarship from the very beginning, his parents encouraged him to go. ‘“You should get out while you can, son,” his proud father would say,”’ Fonseca writes, “These parts are falling to pieces.” Meeting Aliza, “a blue blood who at the age of seventeen had run away from home and the obligations that came with her last name to disappear in the dark streets of a Central American country,” deepens Julio’s indecision. He is taken aback by this British young woman who has convinced a newspaper in the UK to hire her as a photographer to document the Sandinista revolution. “If Michigan represented the world,” Fonseca writes, “Aliza embodied another possible world, far removed from his parents’ expectations. For Julio, this young music fan who…swore she had kissed Sid Vicious was the lighthouse that lit up an unknown and frightening universe.” Thirty years after they met, eleven years after a stroke changed Aliza’s life, and ten days after her death, she is the catalyst who inspires Julio’s journey to Argentina.
Although throughout the years Julio has come across news about Aliza’s writing and her success as a novelist, the two of them have not been much in touch since their road trip. He’s married, living in Cincinnati, where he teaches at a university. She’s changed her name from Aliza to Alicia and switched from writing in English to Spanish, and she’s decided to take her work “in a new direction … To record the human on its true scale … To make it lighter, more playful, sporadic, like the silhouette of a solitary lion crossing an immense savannah.” Her project, titled The Human Void, includes “four ecological novels, each dedicated to one of the classic elements.”
The day Julio receives the letter from Humahuaca, he thinks there’s been a mistake, believes it’s not meant for him. However, reading it, he finds out about Aliza’s death and her request that he edit her final manuscript. This letter opens a door to the past, and to almost forgotten memories. Julio recalls Aliza reciting William Carlos Williams, his father’s old Jeep, their road trip to Guatemala. Why did they separate at the end of the trip? He vaguely remembers a fight, but not what caused it.
The news of Aliza’s passing arrives at a crucial moment in Julio’s life. He’s been sitting in his office, “before a paper on which the word artic was underlined,” at the university, “biting his pen in search of association … Why did he make those lists?” Fonseca asks. “Perhaps because, having reached that point where others might seek a new beginning in lovers or alcohol, he had come to think that lists were his way of maintaining order in a world that was escaping him.”
Julio is going through a crisis and longs to return to Costa Rica where he was born. When he speaks about this possibility with his wife, Marie Hélène, she’s surprised. “Are you crazy?” she asks, “We are not at an age to start over … Nor can I see you going back.” Marie Hélène adds, “You’re more of a gringo than anyone around here.” Her comments make Julio feel anxious and insecure. “He saw that perhaps she was right. There was little left for him in Costa Rica: Even if he went back, he wasn’t sure anyone would recognize him. Time had turned him into a foreigner.” In this phrase Fonseca captures the essence of the immigrant experience, and one of the immigrant’s biggest fears: that while living in another country, never fully belonging and — due to personal or universal circumstances, not able to return to his native country until many years have passed — memories of his existence will be forgotten. Those who remained there will stop remembering him, and upon seeing him again and noticing how much he’s changed, will consider him a foreigner, just as the people do in the country where he currently lives. The knowledge that he has changed, and the fear that as a result he will no longer be able to return to a place he loves (or thinks he loves), a place where childhood memories await — as if there were a secret to happiness there, as if the country and its people had not changed since he left — is a burden Julio is destined to bear. Fonseca writes eloquently about the immigrant perspective because he’s experienced it firsthand. Born in Costa Rica, he spent part of his childhood and adolescence in Puerto Rico, studied in the US and then moved to the UK. Currently, he is a lecturer in Spanish at Trinity College in Cambridge.
In Aliza’s last manuscript Julio reads about Nueva Germania, a village in Paraguay founded in 1887 by Bernhard Föster, a German nationalist married to Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister, and about Karl-Heinz von Mühfeld, an anthropologist who studies the Nataibo’s existence and their decline. Von Mühfeld works with Juvenal Suárez, one of the last four members of the tribe, which has been destroyed by missionaries and other outsiders. Aliza learns about these historical events while secretly reading the diary of her father, Yitzhak Abravanel. Yitzhak visits Karl-Heinz von Mühfeld in a Swiss sanatorium after the anthropologist has been interned there, and experiences firsthand, Mühfeld’s destruction of the cassette tapes he’s worked so hard to record with Juvenal Suárez.
“As a child, when I sneaked off to my father’s office,” Aliza writes, “I used to read his diary entries about the adventures of that unusual duo [Juvenal Suárez and Karl-Heinz von Mühfeld] and imagine — perhaps in an attempt to eradicate the consequences — that it wasn’t real, but fiction … For a while, I would suspend the intuition that the secret of my father’s sadness lay there, and instead surrender to the fascinating game of adventure in remote lands narrated in those pages.”
Following a stroke, Aliza begins to suffer from aphasia, a language disorder that debilitates expression. Rather than giving up, Aliza continues working on remembering, and writing the manuscript she will ask Julio to edit.
In Austral we read about Ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance Italy, France, and find Saussure, Rilke, Wittgenstein, and Shakespeare, among others. As the W.H. Auden poem written in one of the blackboards in Juan de Paz’s theater states: “About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters …”
At times, one gets the sense that Fonseca is telling us we are losing the world, our worlds, and in the process, our ability to remember and honor our past, but I believe he’s inviting us to explore the world beyond the novel’s pages. As Fonseca has said, “I think that in a world obsessed with endings, literature must provide the path for new futures.”
The Julio Gamboa, who is studying a black and white postcard at the beginning of the book, is not the same Julio Gamboa who empties his backpack at the end. He’s gone through a long and arduous journey which has made him question the veracity of history itself and ultimately changes him. In the end, he has accepted what there is: his life, though now he looks at it with different eyes.
[Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux on May 23, 2023, 224 pages, $27.00 hardcover]