Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Comemadre
WORK NOTES:
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WEBSITE:
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RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2011128350
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2011128350
HEADING: Larraquy, Roque, 1975-
000 00808cz a2200217n 450
001 8739303
005 20180502093124.0
008 110818n| azannaabn n aaa c
010 __ |a no2011128350
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca08948943
040 __ |a NIC |b eng |e rda |c NIC |d NcD |d UPB
046 __ |f 1975 |2 edtf
053 _0 |a PQ7798.422.A76
100 1_ |a Larraquy, Roque, |d 1975-
370 __ |a Buenos Aires (Argentina) |2 naf
374 __ |a Scriptwriter
374 __ |a College teachers |a Authors |2 lcsh
375 __ |a Males |2 lcdgt
377 __ |a spa
670 __ |a La comemadre, 2010: |b t.p. (Roque Larraquy) inside front flap (b. in Buenos Aires 1975)
670 __ |a Informe sobre ectoplasma animal, 2014: |b title page (Roque Larraquy) front cover flap (born 1975 in Buenos Aires; scriptwriter and college professor; La comemadre was his first book)
PERSONAL
Born 1975, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, screenwriter, and professor.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Argentinian writer Roque Larraquy is also a college professor of narrative and audiovisual design. Larraquy is a screenwriter and a novelist whose 2010 debut novel, La comemadre, has been published in English as Comemadre. The novel involves a misguided experiment investigating the threshold between life and death and an artist a hundred years later who tries to achieve an aesthetic transformation via making himself into a work of art.
“I wanted to write a novel in two parts, sew together two different narrative materials and force them live together in a reciprocally parasitic way, to unite them gradually in one multiple and continuous body, an unexpected flowering” Larraquy noted in an interview with Aaron Shulman for Believer Online, adding: “Two different eras, like a historical echo chamber; at least two narrators; two politics of narration, one centered on actions and a series of events, another rooted in a ‘story of I.’; two worlds crashing into each other.”
The first part of Comemadre takes place in 1907. A Doctor Quintana, working in a shady sanatorium in Temperley, Argentina, narrates this part of the story. Quintana brings numerous patients into the clinic via his claim that he has a miracle cure for cancer. Once the terminally ill patients arrive, Quintana convinces them to join in on an experiment to determine what happens after a person dies. The experiment turns out to be rather gruesome and certainly not ethical in that it involves beheading people. As Quintana explains to his colleagues, a French study has shown that the brain still functions for about nine seconds after decapitation. Quintana and his colleagues hope that they can use this short time period to ask the decapitated person what they see.
The second part of the book takes place in 2009 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and is narrated by an unnamed, overweight, and gay Argentinian artist. A scholar at Yale University has written a dissertation about the artists’ life and work, which the artist is responding to, reflecting back on his life. A child genius, he became a phenomenon in the art world and eventually teams up with a doppelgänger artist who imitates his work. The artist uses his own body as artwork as he tries to test the limits of the human experience. The two stories converge through the presence of strange man who is the artist’s former lover. “How Larraquy ties the two halves of the novel together is surprising and brilliant,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor.
The story of the sanitarium and the experiments finds Quintana and his male colleagues all being attracted to Nurse Menéndez as they compete to see which one of them can convince the most of the terminally ill patients to volunteer for the life-ending experiment. Their underlying goal, however, is to impress the nurse who is the object of their infatuation. Incredibly, the team find that the French experiment was accurate as they are able to get responses from the study’s participants after decapitating them. However the short-time period does not allow for a comprehensive response, leading Quintana to come up with another experiment in which people are decapitated one after the other in hopes that they will carry on a narrative in the form of a complete sentence or paragraph.
The modern part of the story also features Quintana’s great grandson, Sebastian, who has inherited Quintana’s notes an manuscripts about the experiment. His inheritance also includes a black powder from a plant named comemadre, which produces microscopic larvae causing the body to digest itself. It turns out Quintana used the substance to get rid of the bodies left over from his experiments. Sebastian ends up using the substance as well in an unusual way.
“Part of the horrifying joy of this novel is how safely you can rest in the hands of a maniac as the narrative world is built and burned down around you,” wrote Los Angeles Review of Books website contributor Nathan Scott McNamara. Justin Goodman, writing for the Cleaver magazine website, noted: “Just as the comemadre larvae spontaneously generate in the plant’s sap, symbols seem to spontaneously generate in the leaves of the book.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, April 16, 2018, review of Comemadre, p. 67.
ONLINE
Believer Online, https://believermag.com/ (August 1, 2018), Aaron Schulman, “Almost Like an Exorcism: An Interview with Writer Roque Larraquy.”
Booklist, https://www.booklistonline.com/ (July 13, 2018), Diego Báez, review of Comemadre.
Cleaver, https://www.cleavermagazine.com/ (July 17, 2018), Justin Goodman, review of Comemadre.
Full Stop, http://www.full-stop.net/ (July 17, 2018), Stephen Mortland, review of Comemadre.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/ (July 10, 2018), Nathan Scott McNamara, review of Comemadre.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roque Larraquy is an Argentinian writer, screenwriter, professor of narrative and audiovisual design, and the author of two books, La comemadre and Informe sobre ectoplasma animal. Comemadre will be his first book published in English.
Heather Cleary’s translations include César Rendueles’s Sociophobia, Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets and The Dark, and a selection of Oliverio Girondo’s poetry for New Directions.
Almost like an Exorcism: An Interview with Writer Roque Larraquy
by Aaron Shulman
August 1st, 2018
“I THINK HUMOR IS A TOOL THAT ALLOWS US TO MAKE VISIBLE THE CRITICAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THEMES AND MATERIALS EXPLORED IN THE TEXT.”
Disciplines Roque Larraquy Has Studied:
Phrenology
Mesmerism
Alienism
Comemadre, according to one of the narrators of Argentine Roque Larraquy’s short, eponymous novel, is “a plant with acicular leaves whose sap produces (in a leap between taxonomic kingdoms that warrants further study) microscopic larvae. These larvae devour the plant, leaving only tiny particles behind; the remains then spread to take root in the soil, and the process begins again.” The only remaining samples of comemadre belong to British gangsters who use it to dispose of evidence, much the way Larraquy himself seems to have done, narratively speaking, with his invented plant. In spite of its titular prominence, comemadre appears only fleetingly in the novel, as if it had been consumed by the larvae of other plot devices, and yet its metaphorical sap is everywhere. Comemadre is a book about liminality, the spaces and connective tissues between things, and the transformations that take place in transit from one world to another, whether they are the taxonomic kingdoms of art and science, or life and death.
Comemadre is divided into two parts. The first takes place in 1907, at a sanatorium in Temperley, Argentina. The narrator is one Doctor Quintana, a physician at quack clinic offering a miracle cancer cure that reels in terminal patients who are then cajoled into participating in a grandiose, metempsychotic research experiment: to learn what awaits us after death. Led by their boss, Quintana and the rest of the clinic staff launch a “scientific” experiment under the hypothesis that, since the brain remains active for several seconds after decapitation, decapitated people will have a slim margin during which they can report on what they see. One of the doctors predicts that the “results will be more like poetry than prose… A fortune-teller’s opacity: ethereal nouns, verbs with no easily identifiable subjects.” When Quintana and his colleagues at last get down to guillotining their patients, their experiment unravels, as does Quintana’s authority over the story he’s telling, which itself seems to become a report from a different world.
The second part of Comemadre is set in Buenos Aires, in 2009. The narrator is an obese gay artist who is responding to a dissertation about his life and work by a scholar at Yale. His novelistic annotation tells the story of his sentimental education from lonely child genius to art-world phenom after he meets a doppelgänger who imitates him and becomes his collaborator. Like the Temperley doctors, he uses the human body—his own, however, in his case—to test the boundaries of human experience. And through a stranger former lover, his story ends up folding backs into Quintana’s a century later.
Comemadre is as weird as it sounds, but way funnier than it sounds. It is absurdist theater with an ache for transcendence. Stubbornly oblique and intricately disjunctive (the two parts’ stories’ ends feel fittingly decapitated), the novel reads like fragments from some great beyond, which made me curious not just about the gaps the reader must fill in, but Larraquy’s process of creating them. We emailed during several weeks.
—Aaron Shulman
THE BELIEVER: With its bipartite structure, and the elliptical ideas and tenuous threads connecting the two very different narrative parts, this isn’t a novel in which it’s easy to imagine its genesis. What was the first spark?
ROQUE LARRAQUY: Long before it was populated by doctors and artists, Comemadre was just a structural idea: I wanted to write a novel in two parts, sew together two different narrative materials and force them live together in a reciprocally parasitic way, to unite them gradually in one multiple and continuous body, an unexpected flowering. Two different eras, like a historical echo chamber; at least two narrators; two politics of narration, one centered on actions and a series of events, another rooted in a “story of I.”; two worlds crashing into each other.
BLVR: How did the two different parts take form?
RL: The story that first appeared as a field of interest was the world of contemporary art at the intersection of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which occupies the second part of the novel. The text, in this way, began to write itself backwards. Then, fate brought into my hands a copy from 1907 of Caras y Caretas [Faces and Caretas], a very prestigious magazine of the era, with an advertisement for a sanatorium that offered a cure for cancer. It was the trigger that made the world of the first part of the novel grow.
BLVR: This novel felt like nothing I’d ever read before, but at the same time I sensed the presence of some storytellers I love—a certain Beckettian tone, for example, and a focus on the body that made me think of David Cronenberg. Who were you influenced by?
RL: I’m interested in texts that breath fiction without necessarily belonging to literature. For my first two novels, and also for the third, which I’m writing now, I read books on phrenology, mesmerism, alienism, galvanic medicine, spiritualism, etc., disciplines from the 19th century that dissolved in the 20th century because they didn’t accommodate new scientific paradigms. I also revisited Swift, Marcel Schwob, and Rabelais, in search of certain humor, and writers from the first South American vanguards, like Juan Filloy and Juan Emar, to bring out the artificiality of the language. There certainly were influences from cinema: Cronenberg, Greenaway. If it hadn’t come after Comemadre, Soderbergh’s The Knick also could have been a big influence.
BLVR: In the novel an oblique conversation takes place around the relationship between art and science. What were you hoping to get at?
RL: In recent decades the field of art had placed in the foreground the way in which bodies find themselves ruled by forces that regulate them, mold them, and transform then, and it has tried out aesthetic and political strategies of subversion that establish a dialogue with current reflections in biopolitics, a discipline that has a conflict-prone relationship with science. I was interested in working with both fields, science and art, sewn together by the relationship between bodies and the circulation of power.
BLVR: The best example in the novel of this relationship between power and bodies is the authoritative doctors convinces the dying patients to essentially volunteer for decapitation in the name of science. This is pretty macabre stuff, yet at the same time it’s very funny in the telling. How hard was it to find that balance?
RL: I think humor is a tool that allows us to make visible the critical relationship between themes and materials explored in the text. From the beginning of the idea was to establish a contrast between the dark nature of the narrated events and a distanced, lightly caricatured voice, which takes tragedy into the territory of farce and deconstructs every last suspicion of realism.
BLVR: Argentinian writers have historically strayed away from realism into the fantastic. How was Comemadre received there when it was first published?
RL: When it came out, Comemadre received excellent reviews, although this wasn’t immediately reflected in readers’ access to the book. Slowly, but in a sustained way, Comemadre found those readers, driven, I think, by being assigned in different universities in Latin America and Spain and even some Argentine high schools. The general interest aroused by independent presses in Argentina—which in recent years have managed not only to make their presence known in the media, but also establish a type of literature “on the margins” that wasn’t usually put out by big publishers—also contributed to its success.
BLVR: You wrote this book ten years ago. What has its “rebirth” in English felt like?
RL: In reality it doesn’t feel like a “rebirth,” because the book, to my surprise, hasn’t ceased to move around during all of that time. The different translations (into French, into English, soon into Italian) have allowed me to return to it again and again, given my interested in collaborating with translators in the process of passage into other languages.
BLVR: Coffee House seems like the ideal press for your book? How did it end up with them?
RL: Someone that I don’t know, who I love blindly, recommended it to Coffee House; the editors consulted Heather Cleary, an expert in Argentine literature, and she pushed the project along.
BLVR: What was the translation process like?
RL: Heather Cleary had the graciousness to go back and forth with me during the whole process of the translation; she sent me excellent first drafts, and together we combed the text paragraph by paragraph, in a beautiful exchange.
BLVR: So the process wasn’t like the murderous search for ethereal words that the doctors in your novel engage in?
RL: Argentine Spanish is perhaps the most peculiar and furthest dialect, as much morphologically as lexically, from the Spanish that is spoken in Spain and Mexico, because of the influence of Italian and other European, Amerindian, and African languages that left their stamp on Argentine speech as a result of migratory currents that populated the country. I was stunned by Heather’s sensitivity dealing with these peculiarities, her exquisite mastery of the language and the incredible way in which she sustained a prosody, musicality, and rhythm in the passage to English.
BLVR: What does comemadre, symbolically or metaphorically, mean to you? It’s a plant you’ve invented, but also sounds like Freudian cannibalism.
RL: The word doesn’t exist in Spanish, but refers, literally, to the idea of “eating the mother”; I was interested in this idea as a resonance of the “autophagic” idea of the text. I was worried that the word would be interpreted in a psychoanalytic sense, especially in a city like Buenos Aires, which has the largest number of psychologists per inhabitant in the world; that is why the title in Spanish has the article “la” [the] (La Comemadre), which pulls the term to a place of being a thing, an object, a material. In English the name is merely a sound; after lots of back and forth with alternative titles, Heather and Coffee House decided to keep the title (without “la,” of course), which made me happy. I don’t like titles that announce the content of the books, or the genre they belong to; I prefer titles that seem like a proper, autonomous name.
BLVR: What makes this novel a specifically Argentine novel? Or do you feel it’s not specifically Argentine?
RL: I think it’s a book that can be read anywhere without “Argentine” being an obstacle. It is, however, inscribed, without a doubt, in the two strongest traditions in Argentine literature: political and institutional violence, from a thematic point of view, and the embrace of the fantasy and science fiction genre (I think that Comemadre operates in both genres), genres especially explored by authors central to the Argentine canon like Borges, Cortázar, and Bio Casares, among others.
BLVR: What connection was there between the first part of the novel, which takes place over a hundred years earlier, and the present in which you wrote it? Our current world outside your head and the surreal historical one inside it are wildly different, but they clearly spoke to another in your creative process.
RL: My father was a psychiatrist; my mother, a pianist, worked in a public hospital; my brother is a psychologist. My childhood took place in a home which during the day functioned as a psychiatric office, with the attendant parade of patients and doctors (in general serious cases, from both sides). The world of doctors formed part of my first life experiences and this breathes through the first part of the novel, almost like an exorcism.
BLVR: Can you tell a bit about your second novel?
RL: My second novel is A Report on Animal Ectoplasm, published in Argentina in 2014 and last year in Italy. It’s a book that combines illustrations by the artist and designer Diego Ontivero with a text that talks about the rise and fall at the start and middle of the 20th century of a pseudoscience devoted the tracking of animal ghosts. The book presents a series of report about ghost-sightings of animals that died under traumatic circumstances, their influence on human beings and the tissue of their reality, and the development of a scientific institution that uses the material of these ghosts to combine them in monstrous ways and use them as instruments of social order/chaos, in the context of the first coup d’état.
BLVR: Is it coming out in Engilsh any time soon?
RL: There are no offers yet. I’d love for that to happen.
CONTRIBUTOR
AS
Aaron Shulman is the author of the forthcoming book The Age of Disenchantments: The Epic Story of Spain's Most Notorious Literary Family and the Long Shadow of the Spanish Civil War.
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Print Marked Items
Comemadre
Publishers Weekly.
265.16 (Apr. 16, 2018): p67.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Comemadre
Roque Larraquy, trans. from the Spanish by Heather Cleary.
Coffee House (Consortium, dist.), $16.95 trade paper (144p)
ISBN 978-1-56689-515-6
Larraquy's delightfully terrifying debut tells of a twisted medical experiment and a shocking art installation
a century apart. In 1907 at the Temperly Sanatorium, a few miles outside Buenos Aires, Doctor Quintana's
superiors propose a disquieting experiment in the name of science: decapitate patients without damaging
their vocal cords and, in the few seconds while the severed head maintains life, ask it what it sees. Quintana,
who believes "to be present, but not participate directly, is the dream of every doctor," passively goes along
with conducting the experiment; he's more interested in the sanatorium's head nurse, Menendez, who
rebuffs his increasingly forceful advances. One decapitated head says "I'd like some water"; another
"screams for nine seconds straight." The experiment soon gets out of hand, culminating in a violent,
thoroughly unsettling event. Afterward, the novel switches and is narrated by an unnamed Argentinian artist
in 2009 whose displays include a live baby with two heads. He meets Lucio Lavat, another artist who looks
just like him, and the two conceive a gruesome installation. How Larraquy ties the two halves of the novel
together is surprising and brilliant. Throughout, there is a focus on bodies: a patient believes "each word
[she] utters is a fly leaving her mouth"; at one point, the artist thinks, "people with long fingers touch things
as if they were leaving a trail of slime on them"; and the book's title refers to a plant that produces flesheating
larvae. Shuttling between B-movie horror and exceedingly dark comedy, the novel is somehow both
genuinely scary and genuinely funny, sometimes on the same page--a wickedly entertaining ride. July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
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"Comemadre." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 67. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532689/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=697d7baf.
Accessed 26 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532689
LITERATURE REVIEWS
By Nathan Scott McNamara
07/10/2018
The year is 1907 and a medical director at a clinic in Temperley, Argentina — a province of Buenos Aires — presents a French study to his colleagues. The proposition of the study in short: the human head remains conscious with full use of its faculties for nine seconds after decapitation. The tradition of an executioner holding the head aloft after chopping it off is only in part for the audience. It is also for the decapitated head — providing it the final spectacle of the cheering crowd.
This French study — with no facts or references, as one colleague points out — is the occasion for Argentine writer Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre. Translated by Heather Cleary, this is Larraquy’s debut novel in English and it arrives like a shockwave. It has already earned the wonder and admiration of contemporary horror stars like Brian Evenson and Samanta Schweblin. Schweblin writes, “Here I am, days after reading it, still asking myself what kind of book it is. Is it humor? Horror? Is it about art? Science? Philosophy? One thing is certain: it is just the kind of book that you’ll want to recommend to your friends over and over again.”
The nearly indescribable approach is part of the fun of Comemadre, especially given the confidence and poise of its delivery. “This is what I propose,” the medical director says to the room. “We select a group of terminally ill patients and sever their heads without damaging their vocal apparatus […] We then ask the heads to tell us what they observe.” In the perspective of despicable Doctor Quintana, we carry out this absurd and horrifying experiment.
While the characters in Comemadre sometimes pause to hesitate over the ethics of persuading their patients to consent to a life-ending experiment, they all tend to err on the side of science, or at least improving their own alpha standings in the sanatorium. Each man in this story is also smitten with Nurse Menéndez; in the competition to see who can secure the most volunteers, the competitors care less about the professional bonus than the opportunity to impress their crush. “We’ll go out to dinner once a week. And to the opera,” Quintana says to Menéndez in one of the sections that resembles a scrappy love letter. “When no one’s around, I’ll nibble your backside. I’ll give you a stole to cover your neck, and you’ll remove it only for me.”
But the desperate and sweaty-palmed pursuit of Menéndez acts as more of a fuel than a distraction for their mission, and incredibly, the experiment works. One decapitated head says, “Welcome,” and another “Just like I dreamed.” The heads say, “He doesn’t love me,” “Children last,” and “No eyes or nose, but a mouth.” Not all of the chopped heads speak, but most of them do. Each time you think the experiment has reached a feasible end, it continues. Before long, the doctors feel that nine seconds is too short for proper analysis. Quintana reveals his new vision to his colleagues: “Multiple devices, in a circle. Donors looking at one another. The guillotines activating sequentially, every nine seconds. Each head picking up where the last one left off to make a full sentence, a paragraph […] A string of words worth the expense and efforts of this team.”
To startling effect, this already-short novel reaches a surreal and sudden end when it abruptly splits, launching us to Buenos Aires in 2009 into a new story about the moral and bodily limits of the contemporary art world. The two sections are connected by, among other things, Quintana’s great grandson Sebastian. Sebastian has inherited a variety of his great grandfather’s possessions, including notes and manuscripts and vials of the black powder of the title plant. This plant’s sap produces anomalous microscopic animal larvae that can make a body digest itself. As it’s explained in the book, the Spanish name for the plant died out in Patagonia years ago, but it lives on in England as motherseeker or mothersicken. In the sanatorium in 1907, Quintana used it to successfully address the problem of the pile of bodies generated by the experiment. Quintana’s great grandson uses it again, in a way that again goes beyond what we once thought feasible. Comemadre shocks on each page, and it’s also very funny. It is absurd and straight-faced and frighteningly self-assured.
The characters in Comemadre can be a lot to stomach; the doctors are xenophobic misogynists who talk of eugenics. The artists are self-saboteurs and pain-seekers. They are almost all egomaniacs. But in pursuit of their madness and defense of their image, these characters tend to end up under the knife themselves. In the first section, one researcher insists very quickly on participating in the experiment; they accidentally bobble his head post-decapitation, muting his final speech. In the second, two artists can’t agree on which should get facial reconstructive surgery so they look exactly the same. They finally agree what’s most fair is to choose a third face to imitate, and both have their noses readjusted and skulls shaved.
Part of the horrifying joy of this novel is how safely you can rest in the hands of a maniac as the narrative world is built and burned down around you. In a scene in the first story, we encounter Quintana persuading a patient to consent to the life-ending experiment. The man is of Italian descent and Quintana explains that Mother Nature is wise and it had endowed southern Italians with high levels of potassium. Unfortunately, he says, the potassium affects the chemical structure of the serum (a placebo) they had used to try to fight the patient’s cancer. Quintana is clear and confident, and the patient agrees to the experiment. “The patient doesn’t understand,” Quintana says, “but it’s enough for him that I do.” No reader would be able to know where this story is going. But it’s enough that Larraquy does.
COMEMADRE
by Roque Larraquy
translated by Heather Cleary
Coffee House Press, 152 pages
Reviewed by Justin Goodman
There is a plant “whose sap produces […] microscopic animal larvae” that can consume rats “from the inside out.” It can only be found on “Thompson Island, a small landmass in Tierra Del Fuego,” within Argentinian screenwriter Roque Larraquy’s debut novel Comemadre—the name of this plant of spontaneous generation. Translated in the novel as “motherseeker or mothersicken,” this fictitious plant and its larvae symbolize the dual powers of violence to create and destroy. First as crime, then as art. It is an unmistakably self-conscious symbol for an unrepentantly self-conscious novel, going so far as to have the artist-narrator of the second part dissecting a biographer’s write-up of him and his legacy. Thankfully this consciousness doesn’t eat the novel from the inside out. However, the primary issue of the novel is precisely the necessarily maximalist philosophy this consciousness requires for its slim 129 pages. By the time the comemadre plant has been introduced on page 74, it becomes just another symbol in a long chain of symbols as opposed to the centralizing (and titular) symbol it intends to be.
The comemadre is even introduced as “a botanical digression.” A digression from what, you may wonder? By this point, the initial narrator, Quintana, a doctor at Temperly Sanatorium in 1907 Buenos Aires, has already dragged the reader through a minefield of concepts. First, he ogles the head nurse, Menendez, who, he says, “fits entirely into the space of those words.” Her existence is reduced to the textual and external. Menendez, instead of being pregnant with meaning, becomes a pregnant pause, the ellipses of her identity-concealing occupation. Then a coworker and rival for Menendez’s attention, Papini, tells a layered joke about a “‘fellow [killing] his wife because she wouldn’t tell him what she was doing on the bidet’” in order to explain phrenology. This is followed by a demonstration by the head doctor:
Next to [the duck] is a wooden box of average size. Its lid, which opens down the middle, has a large, round aperture at its center, bordered by the word ergo. Under the lid is a blade that shoots out horizontally with the speed and force of a crossbow. On the sides of the box, next to the reliefs of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, are the words cogito and sum, respectively.
The head doctor decapitates the duck, its head “[remaining] on the ergo,” while “it looks at us. Or thinks the thoughts of a duck.” This demonstration is followed by a report from an eighteenth-century doctor who recorded a similar event in humans at the guillotine. It’s at this point, fourteen pages in, that we arrive at the guiding story of Comemadre: Can the doctors of Temperley Sanatorium convince patients to be guillotined and then get them to talk about the afterlife? In other words, unlike these preceding moments of textual and external understanding, can the doctors transcend exteriority?
Roque Larraquy
Probably not, as several images later (including a fake serum, tin frogs, and circling ants) Quintana’s story concludes with his visceral and violent act of propagation upon Menendez; Quintana, in pursuit of transcendence, makes a mother of her, becoming the motherseeker eating her from the inside out. The savagery of this (pro)creative act is reduced in the second part, taking place in 2009. Here, all that remains of Quintana is his journal, which becomes the inspiration for a final art piece for the artist-narrator and his partner, Quintana’s great-grandson. To be frank, the problem this poses is too great for the novel to overcome: the holistic feeling of Quintana’s story, as troubled as it is by abundance, is broken apart in the section of the novel that reads like an extended afterword. Over-comprehensive is the word. There is too much weighing on Quintana’s story to recontextualize and revitalize it effectively. On its own, in fact, Quintana’s story would have been complicatedly interesting. It resembles Ernesto Sabato’s 1948 Argentinean classic The Tunnel, another story of obsession and the possibility of transcendence. A refreshing, Modernist turn.
As it is, however, Comemadre is not a bad debut in the slightest. Roque Larraquy is a strong monologist. One of the most memorable moments being the previously mentioned explanation of phrenological characters via a man’s curiosity about what his wife does with a bidet. The second part, insomuch as it is an extended monologue, hits the right notes for a narrator-artist with such memorable lines as “I think, no one likes a child prodigy in a Dior vest.” And while his characters often border on tropes—Doctor Papini is a familiar figure as the big idea, all bravado comic relief—there does remain an air of mystery about Quintana’s motives. At times indifferent as Mersault in Albert Camus’ The Stranger, at times as technically cruel as the Nazi doctor Mengele. A concentration camp survivor once said that “I have never accepted that Mengele believed he was doing serious medical work […] He was exercising power.” This would be a fitting description of Quintana. Strikingly, Josef Mengele fled to Buenos Aires after World War II.
And as for the translation by Heather Cleary, it is hard to imagine Comemadre functioning as effectively as it does without her. Much like her work on Sergio Chejfec’s The Dark, she brings clarity to writing that is dense and overflowing.
And as for the translation by Heather Cleary, it is hard to imagine Comemadre functioning as effectively as it does without her. Much like her work on Sergio Chejfec’s The Dark, she brings clarity to writing that is dense and overflowing. While these two projects are markedly different—Chejfec’s writing is mazy, Larraquy’s is layered—they both require a translator that can parse their complications. What rough edges exist in this novel are inherent to the novel. Quintana, observing the doctors of the Sanatorium applauding their American benefactor for proposing to head nurse Menendez, notes that she is “condensed, made material; she adopts her decisive form.” This would be an accurate description of Cleary’s contribution to the novel as well.
At the end of the description of the guillotine box for the Cartesian duck it follows: “the phrase and figures clearly bear allegorical weight, which diminishes the charm of the whole.” A more fully formed reflection on Comemadre doesn’t exist. Just as the comemadre larvae spontaneously generate in the plant’s sap, symbols seem to spontaneously generate in the leaves of the book. The larvae themselves are stored in a black powder that is described by the artist-narrator of the second part as having “an irregular texture.” Comemadre has an irregular texture. It wants to mean too much, so much that it inserts addendums to inform you of its intent. Perhaps Archibald Macleish’s final words in “Ars Poetica” are overstated. But when I read almost wonderful novels like this one I’m still reminded of them: “A poem should not mean/but be.”
Justin Goodman earned his B.A. in Literature from SUNY Purchase. His writing–published, among other places, in Cleaver Magazine, TwoCities Review, and Prairie Schooner–is accessible from justindgoodman.com. His chapbook, The True Final Apocalypse, is forthcoming from Local Gems.
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Comemadre.
Larraquy, Roque (author). Translated by Heather Cleary.
July 2018. 144p. Coffee House, paper, $16.95 (9781566895156); Coffee House, e-book, $16.99 (9781566895224).
REVIEW. First published July 13, 2018 (Booklist Online).
Argentine filmmaker Larraquy delivers a deeply unnerving and morbidly fascinating novel, his first to appear in English. Its title derives from a fictitious plant that generates tiny larvae, which devour the plant, returning it to soil, and from which the comemadre grows anew. This symbiotic cycle embodies a central theme of the novel—bodily destruction in service to a higher pursuit—which Larraquy depicts into two parts. The first takes place in a sanatorium at the turn of the twentieth century, where Dr. Quintana and a slew of accomplices conduct hideous experiments on unwitting cancer patients. Dr. Quintana’s narration wavers between rationalizing the increasingly grotesque treatments and an obsessive attention to Menéndez, a head nurse at the sanatorium. The second part takes place in 2009, just over 100 years later, narrated by an artist and former child prodigy whose work is provocative, offensive, and spectacular. The result is a profoundly strange, often-upsetting account of bodily exploitation in order to push the boundaries of art and science.
— Diego Báez
Comemadre – Roque Larraquy
by Stephen Mortland
Comemadre cover[Coffee House Press; 2018]
Tr. by Heather Cleary
Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre is a short novel about heads and about bodies. It explores the fragile space between life and death, unveiling the alienation inherent in both. The throbbing pulse of the book, which ties together its many disparate and overlapping narratives, is a confrontation with the ways that self-realization can also lead to violence and the objectification of others.
The book is split into two primary narratives. The first takes place in Buenos Aires, 1907, and focuses on Doctor Quintana and his associates at the Temperley Sanatorium. Quintana is a character of considerable nuance, difficult to classify, in equal parts admirable and horrifying — a truly human portrait of a complicated individual. The Sanatorium’s owner and founder, Mr. Allomby, is interested in the notion that a head, once severed from the body, can survive for up to nine seconds. He tasks Quintana and the others with the seemingly impossible job of capturing these moments between life and death and interrogating them. Bypassing any semblance of medical ethics, they engage in a series of depraved experiments in search of answers and personal achievement. They focus on beheadings and attempt to extract from these severed heads nine second prophecies into the afterlife.
The bioethical questions in the story reveal the book’s fascination with locating the seed of individual human cruelty — what degree of collateral harm a person is willing to allow. Early in the novel Quintana addresses his medical superior about the moral implications of the experiment, but even as he does so he feels weak and worries about his position:
I’ve just told him that I think it might be necessary to ‘review — for lack of a better term — ethical aspect of the experiment, in the hope that . . . ’ and I feel an urgent need to erase my mouth, grab a scalpel and cut myself a new one, and then start over.
Their conversation continues and the superior responds by celebrating Quintana’s moral inclinations, even as he does nothing to practically address the concern:
“Your colleagues, Quintana . . . Your colleagues . . . None of them came to discuss this with me. They must be wearing out their rosaries right now, wondering whether they’re going to hell or what. You’re different. Trustworthy.”
“Thank you.”
“This business of speculating with the lives of cancer cases is pretty distasteful, wouldn’t you say? I agree. You need mettle, yes, but you can’t rub out the basic emotions that make us men, make us human. When we cut off that first head, that’s when we’ll see who’s who. The one with the steady hand, the one who feels no pity for the patient, that’s who we’ll need to fire. God only knows what he’s capable of.”
As suggested by this dialogue, the novel is not concerned with excoriating particular bad actions, and it would cheapen the text to read it as a mere dystopian warning against particular medical experimentation. The doctors’ cavalier attitude toward their patients’ potential suffering and their willingness to experiment with human bodies illustrates Larraquy’s broader conviction that our capacity for violence is more readily flexible than we like to believe.
As the doctors carry out these experiments, they are competing for position within the Sanatorium’s hierarchy. But they are also contending for the affections of head nurse Menéndez. The pursuit of Menéndez in many ways usurps the more fantastic elements in this first section of the book. Her fate becomes immediate and crucial to the reader. Larraquy achieves this effect by granting access to the grandiose internal narrative of Quintana and his maddening desire for Menéndez. Her story, much like the novel itself, borrows from different genres depending on the particular situation. At times it reads like a romance and, at other times, like a thriller. In the end, her fate is little different from that of the patients in the Sanatorium. Both she and the patients are made objects of the doctors’ insatiable curiosity, and everyone suffers for it.
The novel then jumps forward one hundred years. This second portion is almost entirely composed of a letter written by an Argentinian artist to an academic who has taken an interest in his work. The artist’s work is unveiled slowly and considerately through the story of his childhood and development as a prodigy. In a series of artistic concessions, the artist engages in extreme manipulation and transformation of his body. Our artist encounters his doppelganger, who so happens to also be an artist, and the two begin working together. The first modification our artist makes is to cut off his finger and hang it as part of their first joint exhibit. Modifications continue and become central to their work, eventually leading the artist to undergo surgery that will erase any slight differences between his face and the face of his look-alike. Many of the same themes are picked up anew in this second section: a focus on the body, the pursuit of sexual acceptance, and the ways that an unerring pursuit of a thing can, in fact, pervert the thing it pursues. Despite differing significantly in plot, the two sections of the novel are brought loosely together at the end, looping the mirrored themes through one another and leaving the reader with something akin to resolution.
Maintaining separate storylines throughout the first and second half of the novel is a unique facet of the text. Despite the scattered details and shared histories that eventually links the two narratives, there is very little in the plot that directly connects them, and their linkage relies on a thematic ascent. The polyphonic quality that results from the narratives sharing the same title enhances the sense of programmed disorder Comemadre naturally induces. The book is unsettling in its depiction of severed bodies, merciless characters, and ominous dreamscapes. Creating this sense of disturbance seems to be a part of Larraquy’s artistic intent. By unmooring the reader, he creates a reading experience that allows for shock in the face of violence, an increasingly difficult task for an artist. Juxtaposing two disparate stories allows the form to match the disconcerting content.
Comemadre is Larraquy’s second novel, but his first to be translated into English. It’s a complicated text, one that defies easy categorization, in a large part due to its wordplay. Heather Cleary (who has translated César Rendueles, Sergio Chejfec, and a selection of Oliverio Girondo) does a glorious job at capturing the nuance and the comedy of Larraquy’s language. For example,
I stand so my feet are aligned with hers. Must I approach her now, or do I have some time to spare? Time it is. One of my shoelaces extends across the room, laces itself through her shoe, inches up her uniform, wraps itself around each of her buttons, and ties itself in a delicate bow at her neck. If I gave a good kick, those buttons would go flying.
As it is in this scene, the absurd is planted and buried throughout Comemadre, creating a sense of constant doubt and uncertainty. The writing is sparse and evocative, even as it takes considerable risks. The effect accomplishes a great deal in short spaces.
By tempering even the darkest of moments of the story with grand metaphors, scathing interiority, and the comically absurd, Larraquy pulls the rug out from under the reader’s despair, humanizing the seemingly inhuman cruelty of its characters. It’s essential that the story feels empathetic and relatable if Larraquy is to effectively raise questions of cruelty, alienation, and guilt. The comedy of the text allows the reader to form a certain kinship with the characters, while their increasing cruelty forces the reader to reckon with the centrality of violence in the lives of these deeply human characters.
Comemadre is a story about the limits of science and discovery, about the purpose and process of art, about the dangers of the unchecked male ego, and much more. Beneath each of these distinct intentions, though, the book is not fundamentally theoretical, but relational. Larraquy imagines a complicated world of webbed human bonds that span generations. Each of these bonds is pulling on another, creating unique tension, unique threats, and unique possibilities. Larraquy’s scientists and artists attempt to uncover their true natures on both personal and existential fronts. In the process, their desire to be validated and accepted by others becomes all-encompassing. As these relationships carry the narrative and take center stage, it becomes apparent that guilt and desire can easily transform into violence once acted upon. The profound tragedy suggested by Comemadre is that in the absence of extended validation, that validation is too often stolen by force. At the book’s fundamentally relational foundation, Larraquy demonstrates that the tenderness which results from shared vulnerability is often undergirded by a violence springing from the same source.
Stephen Mortland lives in Indiana. His fiction has appeared is forthcoming in XRAY Literary Magazine, Expat Press, and Faded Out. His reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in CLASH and Necessary Fiction. You can find him online @stephenmortland.