A book a day: Belisario Flores: The outdated island

Original language: Español

Year of publication: 2016

Valuation: recommendable

Bolivia. Second decade of the 20th century. Evo Morales has been in power for some time now and the more or less traditional elites have lost weight in the country. As if that were not enough, the situation is screwed up and a group of people (The Sublime Ones, to be precise) of high economic level decide to lock themselves in a shopping center waiting for the gringos to arrive to rescue them and take them to the United States. This is the premise of a novel that is nothing more than a ruthless satire of a part of Bolivian society that the authors know well, a part of society that is terribly hypocritical, racist, sexist, etc.

The authors? Yes, the authors. Because Belisario Flores is the pseudonym of Mario Murillo and Diego Loayza, so The late night island It is a four-handed novel in the tradition of Bioy and Silvina, Gabo and Vargas Llosa (or was the thing about these and the hands something else? or Carmen Mola (who, by the way, are not cool at all, besides being six hands instead of four).

Well, the fact is that this is a novel in which there is an “ontological coach” who would be Paulo Coelho (even more) hottie, former presidents of the Government, soldiers, footballers, financiers, adults and young people who are crazy… a text in which the funny, the absurd, the grotesque and the tragic are mixed in what we could call a “Bolivian-style grotesque” .

But the exaggerated does not exclude more “deep” elements in the novel. You know, the grotesque as a distorting mirror of reality. So in The late night island There is sociology, there is social anthropology, there is a “study” about how a small human group evolves in a situation of extreme tension and in a closed environment, about the transition from a perfect society to a nightmare, about unspeakable fantasies and desires in turbulent times. . Of course, it must be noted that the authors are two gentlemen sociologists!

Perhaps the only thing that can be attributed to the novel is an excess of characters that means that some of them are poorly outlined. I understand that they are archetypes that can fulfill their function in the novel, but their number seems excessive.

Finally, honorable mention to the language of the novel. You won’t believe it but the characters don’t talk as if they were from Valladolid!!!!! Authors, settings and protagonists are Bolivian and speak in Bolivian Spanish (glossary included), as it could not be otherwise. What seems logical may take the non-Bolivian reader back a bit. Don’t do it, we have a brutally rich common language and this book is a good example of it.