A book a day: Edmundo Desnoes: Memories of underdevelopment

Original Language: Español

Year of publication: 1965

Valoración: It’s very nice

An ordinary man in the face of society and the difficulty in assimilating to a historical current, a manual antihero in front tragicomic and sordid … Any of these phrases (or all of them) would summarize the spirit of a novel taken to the cinema in 1968 by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, director of the well -known Strawberry and chocolate.

Published in 1965 and set between the invasion of Playa Girón and the missile crisis, Memories of underdevelopment He moves away from the literary currents prevailing in the region and approaches an existentialist, sifted narrative (yes) by the sociocultural environment. In short, a novel closer to the “European” tradition than to magical realism or socialist realism (in its different forms) that handled the cotarro at that time.

The title already gives a track of the Dostoevskian of the novel, right? The author himself recognizes him in the epilogue to this edition, written 40 years later! At the same time, he recognizes in him the undeniable influence of The foreigner of Camus or Pío Baroja in his work. How to deny it, especially in the case of French Nobel!

Written in the form of a newspaper that lacks dates and references and with an overwhelming predominance of the brief phrase (a little in the style of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, but more “clean”), Memories of underdevelopment It is the story of Sergio Malabre, an split man, a foreigner in his own land that observes and analyzes reality and himself with a cynical point.

People seem more stupid every day; And I am not smarter now

I am 39 years old and I am already an old man. I don’t feel worse, as I would expect an oriental philosopher, or more mature. I feel more stupid

In favor but against the revolution (They are all illusory. Against him, because he lives convinced that he will easily recover his comfortable ignorance; The revolution, because it believes that this country can get out of underdevelopment)influenced by the American popular culture but renegade of the United States and its “protection”, Sergio Malabre would be a member of honor of the “was carried away”, one of those book voyeurs.

And as a good voyeur, Malabre / Desnoes offers us in their adventures a chronicle of the country and the time in different aspects: the social, the political, the cultural, etc. Novel, yes, but well anchored in the reality of the moment.

All of the above does not mean that Memories of underdevelopment Be a 100% classic novel. In fact, the insertion of Kennedy or Fidel speeches, the inclusion of the author himself as the protagonist, the reference to writings of Malabre himself and that are included as Appendices to the novel (I love it Yodor) Or the reproduction of boleros fragments speak of the author’s will to overcome the traditional frameworks of the novel, to approach the documentary, the cinematographic and/or the popular, and place Desnoes close, in their own way, to types like Manuel Puig.

Anyway, a very good novel that would only put a but: its end, somewhat abrupt. Like that of this review. Hala, to read!