Several years before Andrés Neuman’s work could be read in English, the Argentine author’s name was already known to many literary Anglophones. In 2007 and 2010, he had been named to prominent lists of promising young Latin American authors, curated by Bogotá39 and Granta. In 2011, a collection of Roberto Bolaño’s essays, originally published in 2004, appeared in English, translated by Natasha Wimmer. The book included a short piece on Neuman that provided the kind of blurb-ready praise that was destined to be — and has been — continuously reproduced, with the Chilean luminary deeming that “the literature of the twenty-first century will belong to [Neuman] and a precious few of his blood brothers.” Bolaño wasn’t necessarily wrong, but given the recent stellar work from Selva Almada, Mariana Enríquez, Ariana Harwicz, Samanta Schweblin, and other Argentinian women, it is probably best to overlook his dubiously gendered collective noun.
Finally in 2012, Neuman’s English-language debut arrived. Traveler of the Century, translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza García, was Neuman’s fourth novel, but the sweeping and subtly fantastical epic, set in the ever-shifting (think Brigadoon) city of Wandernburg, proved an ideal introduction to him for English-speaking audiences. Traveler landed on several year-end “Best of” lists, particularly in the U.K., but to my mind it remains under-appreciated. It was followed by two of Neuman’s subsequent novels and a collection of short stories, all translated by Caistor and García, plus a nonfiction book of travel essays about Latin America, translated by Jeffrey Lawrence. Each title was well received, and collectively they display a persistently searching mind with sprawling interests and a daring stylistic creativity. However, English-speaking audiences had no way, besides learning Spanish, of seeing how those creative fires were sparked, how Neuman first attracted the attention of Bolaño and so many others. Until now.
Nearly a quarter-century later, Neuman’s 1999 debut novel, Bariloche, is finally available in English in an attuned translation from poet Robin Myers. Where the topics of language and translation drove the plot of Traveler of the Century, in Bariloche Neuman’s expressive techniques themselves are the main attraction.
The narrative follows Demetrio, a Buenos Aires garbage collector, through his early morning shifts with his partner El Negro. The two start out while the city still sleeps, breaking only briefly for a breakfast of cafe con leche and maybe a medialuna if time permits. They go to the same place everyday, and everyday “the Pony,” a retired newspaper seller who now day-drinks red wine, is sitting in his usual spot. Occasionally, Demetrio or El Negro will invite someone living on the streets to eat with them. After their shift, Demetrio goes home to nap and his partner goes straight to his second job, returning home to his wife and children late in the evening. Demetrio spends his evenings alone, wearing a pair of well-worn black boots and working 500-piece puzzles that pull him back to his childhood through their depictions of the countryside around the southern city of Bariloche.
Demetrio left the city, on the banks of Lake Nahuel Huapi, when he was still a teen, his family forced to move to the capital after his father lost a job at the slaughterhouse. The memories Demetrio focuses on are from his last summer in the south, days spent with a red-headed girl “with the voracious curiosity of fire-beings.” His time with the nameless girl has left a void in him, his “whole life has been sort of begging for scraps of that feeling ever since.” He still lives alone, a creature of habit who spurns change, but remains a dreamer who often drifts into his thoughts unaware of what he is doing.
Neuman punctuates Demetrio’s life and recollections with well-considered details, but it is how he expresses them — and particularly here how Myers has chosen to translate them — that makes Bariloche so endlessly satisfying. Nearly every chapter starts with a sentence that acts as a beacon to any readers whose attention has lingered on the just-concluded prior chapter. “The blinds, a giant’s heavy lids, revealed a clotted sky.” “The drenched florescence of their suits parted the curtain of rain.” “This is what Demetrio dreamed one viscous, cast-off evening.”
As can be seen in those sentences and many others, Neuman repeatedly links actions to objects with startling originality, inventiveness, and whimsy, abetted by Myers’ considered phrasing. A work truck isn’t being serviced, it is being “disemboweled”; a lunch isn’t eaten early, it is “premature,” only enjoyed before “furiously surrender[ing] to sleep”; water isn’t refreshing, but instead “redeem[s] his pores.”
Demetrio interacts with his environment, rather than simply moving through it; inanimate objects perform human actions, and the senses are cross-wired. While going to work one morning, “Demetrio’s drowsiness smeared the pavement. The stoplights stained the symmetries of traffic.” Describing the summer before his father lost his job, Demetrio observes that “troubles seek each other out as if trying to start a family.” And he remembers how back in Bariloche, “the myrtles were like no others and the chocolate tasted vaguely of Europe in the snow.”
Garbage, and by extension Demetrio’s job, is equated with a corporeal system ingesting, digesting, and expelling the detritus of the city. One morning, Demetrio and El Negro “could make out the entrails of a [garbage] bag through a savage gash in the plastic.” At night their “garbage trucks slept a heavy sleep, cooling their stomachs.” And the main garbage dump has a greedy “reeking maw” at its center.
Myers is also a poet whose talent for sonic felicities in translation is remarkable. Some sentences, like the following, are lyric gems: “Blistered potatoes, tomatoes bursting scarlet, an obscene, succulent steak before plunging into bed, rubbing his face, his thighs against the sheets, smiling, exhausted; then unconsciousness.” The meter of even quotidian sentences is often startlingly precise. “He could still smell the scent of sweat and quasi-French perfume.” Or again here, where the final neologism perfectly mirrors the anapest of degraded: “Its shoddy light degraded every object into whitishness.”
Occasionally there is just an image the requires repeated rereading, so perceptive, so artfully is it crafted, as with this description of a woman undressing: “As her stockings curled into themselves like black cream, the hairs on her thighs changed direction.”
Even when Neuman describes the most seemingly mundane item — the picture printed on a puzzle —his imagination roams wildly, melding naturalism with Demetrio’s memories of the worlds the pieces depict to bring the puzzles to life:
“The amancay exudes a misty, wheat-hued silhouette. The ancient sky is clearer where the araucaria reaches to. The bark is chiaroscuro-dappled. The clouds’ strange rustling sifts into the left-hand side, the shore-side, and menaces the sky-blue swaths. And something new: the mastheads of a pine grove start to surface on the other shore. The future trace of the horizon will suspend the spread of water; up above, the brawny dorsals of the mountain range, that great osseous reptile. But for now, only a milky cold, a summit taking shape.
Sometimes he wonders if there couldn’t be, in some secluded corner of the landscape, behind the amancay, perhaps, perched on a boulder by the shore, a haunting figure, pale-faced in the shadows, reddish tresses rippling till the wind sweeps her away: those copper threads he had desired, touched, and smelled one frozen dusk.
The storm throngs closer, widening its gaseous black insides. The water travels, roughs its course.”
While the story lurches somewhat toward a rather abrupt (and for me, not wholly satisfying) conclusion, Bariloche clearly announces Neuman’s many talents. His English-speaking fans, and I count myself enthusiastically among that group, should be thrilled that Myers has finally gifted us with the opportunity to discover the source of all that much-deserved praise.
[Published by Open Letter on January 10, 2023, 140 pages, $16.95 paperback]