Uruguay.

There's some enjoyable and often amusing language:

The best way to get to know a city is to fall in love with one of its women, someone inclined to mother a man far from home and also appreciative of different pigmentation. She will trace him a path that does not figure on any map and instruct him in a language he will never forget. She will show the stranger the bridges and the secret corners of the place, and, nurturing him like a babe, teach him to lisp his first words, take his first steps, and recite the names of birds and trees. Actually, I am not quite sure about this last point: in the big cities where we live the names of birds and trees are no longer familiar, and anyway, for all the notice we take of them, the trees could be made of plastic, like the tablecloths. p. 33.

There's also a beautiful section about identifying with ducks and water. However, a lot falls flat. Though I am a person with a few learned degrees, who has managed Irigaray and Kristeva and Wittig in graduate semiotics and women's studies courses, I can't quite make sense of this book, and from the limited reviews I can find in English, it's not clear that anyone else can, either. The best spin I can put on this is that it's an anti-novel, one that undoes itself (as the protagonist Ecks [X?] triumphantly undoes his/the imaginary king's virility by shouting "virility!", as the tapestry representing creation is incomplete). See the problem? I'm not going to put spoiler tags on this because it's pre-spoiled, a pastiche of genres, foci, tones, and, relentlessly, no particular plot except Ecks's ongoing travel. I began to admire how relentlessly it managed not to cohere. Perhaps that's its point. ( )

The literature of exile that emerged in the wake of the repressive regimes of the 1960s and 70s allowed Latin American writers to address cosmopolitan themes while incorporating elements from a range of earlier regional forms, from Spanish baroque to Romantic modernismo then vangardismo, from social and political realism to Magic Realism and testimonio.

Cristina Peri Rossi (ex-Uruguayan, settled in Barcelona) lets the allegory of The Ship of Fools—a shipload of the mad and diseased abandoned at sea—stand in for the exiled, the battered, and the disappeared. Her fiction is experimental without being obscure, psychologically and emotionally rich without being maudlin. As the characters in The Ship of Fools attempt to come to grips with memory, loss, desire and dislocation, we get a perceptive meditation on language, books, and meaning.

The main character is called Equis (‘X’ or ‘ex-‘?). Having just set foot on the Great White Ship in the opening pages, X is questioned by the Beautiful Passenger: “Is this really your first voyage?” Not exactly, he replies, “I’ve already read about this journey.”

X is the exile, forever on the move, until leaving and arriving become a kind of routine. He has his rituals—the books which he buys as soon as he arrives and settles in a new place are almost always the same: The Bible, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Poe’s stories, Kafkas’s The Trial and Metamorphosis, the lyrics of Catullus and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. A more appropriate reading list for the wayfaring stranger would be hard to imagine. He is also fond of old atlases and drawings of mythical beasts.

Peri Rossi alternates episodes in the lives of her characters with descriptions of the Tapestry of Creation, hanging in the Cathedral of Gerona, “the product of a religious system, a world, that is perfectly concentric and ordered. But such harmony assumes the destruction of those aspects of reality which oppose it; thus it is almost always purely symbolic.”

(The tapestry—beautiful and awe-inspiring—is a kind of totem for the perverse logic woven by the military regimes that justified state terrorism by portraying themselves as the defenders of Christian civilization against ‘subversion.’)

In contrast to the concentric and ordered world of repressive symbols, life for the exile and the battered and the disappeared is one of uncertainty, fluidity, and disconcerting juxtapositions. With cruelty comes absurdity. A friend of X is disappeared, bundled in blankets then stuffed in the trunk of a car, all the while worried for the caged bird left in the apartment alone, perhaps to starve. Suffocating in the dark heat of the trunk, his chief regret is that he will miss opening night at the circus, and particularly the performance of the sweet-voiced blonde lady dwarf, who only the night before he saw respond to the taunts of a saloonkeeper with a burst of violent fury. The disappeared are held in an abandoned cement factory, where the soldiers and officers are predisposed not only to violence but to poetry, and the well-read captives are forced to produce exalted appreciations of their captors’ literary works.

On an island where he stays in a small apartment with a terrace overlooking the town center, X meets Graciela, who represents for him youthful freedom; he tells her she is like “an idea free of historical circumstances”—to which she responds that the young are free “because they can change ideas often, unlike the old, who may change, but not in those things which they consider important.” She proceeds to disarm him psychologically, dismantling his assumptions and questioning his motivations (does he not know himself?) in what reads like a reverse seduction disguised as a philosophical tête à tête. Before such an intellectually autonomous and emotionally assured female character, X suspects that all his own actions are merely deception.

The island of Pueblo de Dios and its little town is one of those places where the energy of the world is polarized, as demonstrated by the magnetism of its tides and the five revelations purported to have occurred there. But, alas, notes X, revelations are always unclear. The prophet speaks not so much to be understood but to be obeyed. In the beginning was the metaphor, then came abbreviations.

Morris, who arrived a long time ago on Pueblo de Dios, rarely leaves his house because other people are disdainful of the strange-sounding words he uses. He explains that his tendency toward extravagant rhetoric is due to the fact that he learned the natives’ language by reading writers and philosophers of the sixteenth century. Other residents of the island include an old English poet whose books are all out of print, a physicist who has developed a fear of electricity, a retired television comedienne, a famous rapist, and a former astronaut, homesick for the moon, in exile from the peacefulness of empty space.

A disquisition by Morris on the city of Albion reads like a 4 page Dadaist riff that takes consideration of the phrase ‘navel-gazing’ to its logical, preposterous conclusion. Morris hopes to publish his memoir, but during an amusing (for the reader) and disheartening (for the writer) exchange with an editor in a publisher’s office, he is unable to respond satisfactorily to her enquiries: “What predominates in your work? Action? Sex? Politics? Is it an optimistic or pessimistic book?” Eventually Morris decides to leave for Africa after falling in love with a precocious 9-year-old boy he meets in the city park.

Graciela quits a teaching job to join Morris, the boy, and his mother sailing away on the Great White Ship. X stays behind, and finds work with a ‘transport company’ driving poor women to the city to have abortions. After smuggling on to the bus a young woman (Lucía) unable to pay the fare, X has a recurring dream: a king in love with his daughter demands her suitors to answer an obscure question, which keeps the daughter only for her father’s hands and eyes. In his dreams, X hears the question repeated over and over: What is the greatest tribute and homage a man can give to the woman he loves? He goes in search of Lucía, finds temporary respite in the room of a battered prostitute, then discovers Lucía performing in a live sex show in the city.

In the end, on The Ship of Fools, the women are all survivors. X discovers the answer to the enigma. The king dies. Exile and loss, Peri Rossi assures us, are part of the human condition. But so is perseverance in the face of absurd cruelties.