Osvaldo Lamborghini (1940–1985)

This novella was very disturbing. Honestly, it was probably the most messed-up thing that I’ve ever read. It was about some people in a room torturing and mutilating each other. It was really shocking, and whatever I was expecting, I don’t think this was it. I think, though, that I can respect Mr. Lamborghini for writing this, and I understand why it is an important book in the canon of Argentine literature. The writing is very creative, the language is very Argentine and was very familiar to me (there’s even a little bit of vesre, which is always fun), and the story that he tells, however horrible it may be, is told very well. I would like to revisit it after reading up on the radical, left-wing political movements of 1960s and 70s Argentina, because the characters in the story are young radicals and the story, one assumes, is allegorical. As I think about it, representing the living situation and interactions of a group of young, politically active “radicals” as Lamborghini does here makes sense: when people get together and talk about politics and revolution, there is quite a bit of self-inflicted and mutual mutilation regarding ideas and views. Perhaps he’s just taken that situation, of a bunch of people sitting around trying to prove how smart and right they are, and decided to replace their words with gruesome and despicable acts. It was hard for me to read this without being able to fully understand the context it was written in: it was kind of like walking into a theater showing one of the Saw movies a half hour into the movie, and just watching people get tortured for an hour without quite understanding why (but this Saw movie was directed by a director you’d heard a lot about, and you wanted to understand what he was trying to do, and you thought that even if it was torture, it seemed very well done).

Anyway, I’ll probably recommend this story to about two or three people who I think would appreciate it, and not mention it to anyone else. It was intense and graphic, but I do respect it for a few different reasons. It’s an introduction to an era of Argentine literature that I’m not extremely familiar with, and I think that as I read more Argentine books from the past fifty years, I will be glad to be familiar with this one. I like it when authors take chances and cross boundaries, and since I don’t exactly have a weak stomach, while I was disturbed, I kept reading. Also, I enjoyed the language, and it made me feel like I was back in Buenos Aires. Finally, the novella was powerful and jarring and was able to affect me more than most books I read, and that, even considering the circumstances, made it worthwhile. I can’t really even think of other books to compare it to. I’ve seen some movies that are somewhat similar: Chan-wook Park’s Oldboy and Takashi Miike’s Audition come to mind. Maybe that’s the best reference point: Asian horror. Anyway, if you want to read El Fiord, I found it here, with an introduction by César Aira:

http://www.taringa.net/posts/arte/4160747/El-fiord:-Osvaldo-Lamborghini.html… (más)