War and Peace in Montevideo

Translated by Jennifer Croft
Read by David Desantos
Length:~4 hours

Up until the last 10 pages I thought I’d found a perfect gem of a book, but even though the ending seemed rushed, I will always remember it fondly.

It’s essentially a comedy of a man’s errors as he, a married middle-aged writer called Lucas tries to satisfy his lust for a girl called Guerra. Lucas has just one day to accomplish this act that he has dreamed of for six months.

Guerra is bold and beautiful. Lucas has arranged to meet her for lunch during his one day trip from Buenos Aires to Uruguay where Guerra lives. I liked Guerra from the moment she said, on realizing Lucas’s sole intention was to bed her, that men with fck anything that moves, and the only reason they don’t have sex with their sisters is that their sisters won’t let them. And even perhaps their mothers…though Lucas, horrified cuts her short on this.

From the moment Guerra turns up at the restaurant we realize things will not run smoothly for Lucas. Guerra brings a borrowed pit bull to their lunch meeting.

“Years and years of genetic manipulation had edged it toward what it was today: a jaw of a dog, rough, tough, a canine cudgel of lethal chomps, a Tasmanian devil with a huge square head.”

They go shopping, get high on beer and marijuana, visit a tattoo parlor . Lucas who has never had a tattoo in his life has a one inked onto a shoulder. Stoned, he chooses a Celtic symbol for war to remember Guerra, and considers having Paz tattooed on his other shoulder but Guerra tells him his wife may find it suspicious.

We follow Lucas’s trip and trips from his home to Uruguay and back . We meet his fellow travelers who annoy him, as he only wants to think of Guerra and how on earth he’s going to explain his tattoo to his wife.

‘Toward the middle of the bus across the way a guy answered his cellphone and started screeching into it. He was eplaining something to his secretary coordinating shifts. He was a doctor. He was imposing his bellowing upon the sleep and daydreams of all the other passengers, his scheduling issues, his abuse of that woman who was just trying to put his messy commitments in order. “You can put off the medical group thing until October. For the love of god Isabel don’t plug everything into the same week. Give it just a tiny bit of thought.” I’ve never liked male doctors.’

As Lucas lurches from one comedic disaster to another we realise he is writing the novella as a confession to his wife.

There are plenty of side events as Lucas’s conquest becomes increasingly unlikely, and the main disaster which I can’t mention here for spoiler reasons keeps the reader engrossed.

But toward the end, Pedro Mairal appears to lose interest and rushes through the denouement and its aftermath. A pity as the book is as funny as hell and it’s disappointing that the ending disappoints.

Still it’s all worth it. I recommend this novella. A short but smart read. ( )

Muy entretenida, me la leí en una tarde ( )

Argentinian author Lucas Pereyra has passed his 40s and displays all the symptoms of a mid-life crisis. He is suffering from writer’s block, his finances are in bad shape, and he suspects that his wife Catalina is having an affair. But a turn of fortune beckons. Lucas is due a substantial payment on foreign sales of his work, and he plans to travel from Buenos Aires where he resides, across the River Plate, to Montevideo, in order to smuggle the sum in cash back to Argentina, dodging taxes. If he succeeds, Lucas can then settle down, concentrate on his writing, and start to gather the lost pieces of his life.

But Lucas also has another reason to visit Montevideo: meeting the young woman of the title – Guerra – with whom he had gotten acquainted at a writers’ event. His infatuation with Guerra gives Lucas a taste of youth, and his increasingly desperate attempts to seduce her are worthy of a love-struck teenager.

It is hardly a spoiler to state that things will not go exactly as planned. The novel(la) plays out over Lucas’s eventful day, giving us an insight into his psyche. He is, obviously a flawed character. Even a middle-aged male reader such as I, while more forgiving of the protagonist’s foibles, recognise that Lucas can be ego(t)istic, vain, sexist and, in some of his choices, incredibly short-sighted. Yet, there is a thread of endearing self-irony running through his monologues, turning Lucas into a tragicomic figure as we hurtle towards the novel’s bittersweet conclusion. The narrative voice is perfectly pitched, and brilliantly conveyed in Jennifer Croft’s translation. Pedro Mairal mixes suspense and comedy, philosophical insight and slapstick to create an entertaining and well-observed novel.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-woman-from-uruguay-by-pedro-maira... ( )

This was a short, easy read with an interesting structural style. The narrator is telling the story of his one fateful day to his now ex wife. He is hoping that going to Uruguay to collect 15,000 dollars and bring them back tax free is worth the danger of carrying this much cash. He hopes the money will solve everything, his debt, his relationship with his wife, his ability to write his next novel without the burden finances. He suspects his wife has met a lover and admits to her in his narrative that he has have a few, but currently he is hoping to reconnect with a younger woman he met about a year ago at the book fair. They have emailed over the course of time and he has told her that he's coming to get some money and to rendezvous with her. It is a classic midlife crisis about to go very wrong. Though the events in the novel happen over a single day, his writing reveals the consequences of these actions and provides a glimpse of his current situation. I recommend this novel and would be interested in his other novels.

Lines:
When two people are attracted to each other, a strange telekinesis opens up a path between them that removes all obstacles. It’s that clichéd. Mountains are moved aside. It was three in the morning, and I went to sleep drunk on all of that, without an ounce of guilt.

Now I did kiss her. I put my arms around her waist and pressed her to me. A kiss with tongue, an ensnaring kiss, a kiss of perfect intimacy, as though the enormous dome of the sky were coming so close it created our own run of silence.

A person in love is like a person afflicted with severe paranoia: he thinks everything is speaking directly to him. The songs on the radio, movies, the horoscope, random street flyers … Guerra’s piercing.

Years and years of genetic manipulation had edged it toward what it was today: a jaw of a dog, rough, tough, a canine cudgel of lethal chomps, a Tasmanian devil with a huge square head.

“I like my men worn in, just like my jeans.” “I’m at death’s door, in that case. Totally destroyed.”

She seemed relaxed, slightly tousled, with a peace in her voice like she was high on the endorphins of a recent orgasm. ( )

Pedro Mairal is a notable writer and poet from Argentina. The press release that came with my review copy tells me that he's a professor of English literature in Buenos Aires, that he won the Premio Clarin in 1998 and that in 2007 he was included in the Hay Festival's Bogotá 39 list, which names the best Latin American authors under 39. From what I can make out from his bio in Spanish, he has won prizes, had a book made into a film, been translated in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany and now English, and had his own TV show about books called Printed in Argentina. (Did I mention that he's also rather telegenic?) Amongst other accomplishments, in 2013 he published a novel in sonnets, “El gran surubí” which strikes me as being a very difficult task.

First published in 2016, The Woman from Uruguay was a bestseller in Latin America and Spain, and has been published in twelve countries. I think it's a book that can be taken in different ways by different readers. The blurb tells me that it's an unforgettably poignant story of two would-be lovers. Colm Tóibin says it's a picaresque comedy and a penetrating study of a man on the verge of middle age. Sigrid Nunez says it's a searing tale of seduction and betrayal, both wryly comic and deeply serious. Me? I think it's black comedy at its best.

The novella is the story of a day in the life of Lucas Pereyra, an unemployed writer in his forties. He is being supported by his long-suffering wife who may have found ways to enliven her days. They have a young son called Maiko who Lucas uses as an excuse for not having got any writing done. On the day in question Lucas has hatched a rudimentary plan to collect an advance on books he hasn't written yet, travelling to Uruguay to collect it in cash so that he doesn't have to pay Argentinian taxes and kickbacks. Oh, and the other reason he sets off on this risky enterprise is because he hopes to catch up with a Uruguayan women who he met some months ago at a conference. His fantasy of a passionate rendezvous in Montevideo is a mid-life crisis waiting to happen.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/12/26/the-woman-from-uruguay-by-pedro-mairal/ ( )