The Woman from Uruguay by Pedro Mairal

 Published in Argentina in 2016; published in translation by Bloomsbury Publishing on July 20, 2021

The Woman from Uruguay is written as a confession, or perhaps an explanation. The narrator tells the story of a couple of eventful days in his life, bracketed by less dramatic events before and after those days. He is speaking to his wife, the mother of his child. He asks banal questions like, “At what point did the monster you and I were start getting paralyzed?” It almost seems that he is bringing his wife up to speed on his life before and after they broke up. Since she is certainly aware of much of the story, including the reason their relationship ended, the narrator is clearly speaking to a larger reading audience while pretending to be engaged in an intimate communication.

The narrator is Lucas Pereyra, a writer who lives in Argentina. He’s recently been paid a book advance. The funds are in his bank account in Uruguay. He intends to travel to Uruguay to pick up the funds, which he desperately needs. He wants to repay money he borrowed from his wife and friends and to spend nine months writing the book without needing to take on a teaching job. He plans to smuggle the cash into Argentina to avoid paying taxes. The amount exceeds import limits and he knows he’ll be in trouble if he’s caught by Customs.

Lucas has an ulterior motive for visiting Uruguay. He wants to see Magali Guerra Zabala, a woman he met once before while attending a writer’s conference in Uruguay. Their time together was frustratingly limited because they both needed to return to their lives and partners. They experienced “the sadness of fresh, just-discovered love.” Lucas can’t seem to get Guerra out of his mind. They begin an email exchange with promises to meet again.

Most of the story follows Lucas in Uruguay as he picks up the money and visits with Guerra. Nothing goes as he planned. Perhaps the novel should be seen as a commentary on the futility of planning, or at least as a comment on the risk that expectations will lead to unexpected turmoil.

Guerra offers familiar opinions of men in general (“The problem is you guys will hump anything that moves”) and of Lucas in particular (“You send me an email out of the blue saying you’re coming, you suddenly show up, you want us to race off to a hotel and have sex, and then you’re off to catch the ferry to go back”). Lucas offers familiar opinions of women in general (generally focused on how women make him feel “wounded, sexually, I mean, the injured male, depressed”) and of Guerra in particular (“How did I get mixed up in this Venezuelan soap opera?”).

Pedro Mairal creates some moments of drama that don’t involve relationships. He adds a crime to the story to create a conflict that forces Lucas to confront his life and his relationship with his wife when he returns to Argentina. Lucas does seem to learn something from his Uruguayan adventure and he at least claims to have changed his life. The primary change seems to be a willingness to accept his sorry fate. Whether readers will learn life lessons from Lucas’ experiences that they haven’t learned from similar stories, or from life, is doubtful.

Some of the plot seems forced, including the crime drama and the revelation that leads to the destruction of Lucas’ relationship. With regard to the revelation, I got the impression that Mairal was trying to be hip and trendy. If so, themes that might be hip in Venezuela are a bit stale to readers who encounter those themes on a regular basis.

In the end, Lucas feels betrayed by his wife (notwithstanding the number of times he cheated on her) and can’t decide whether he was betrayed (in a nonsexual way) by Guerra. Is there more to the story? Not really. Nothing in The Woman from Uruguay is particularly profound or unexpected. We know that things go wrong in life. We know that people betray each other. We know that some women enjoy making drama and that some men can’t keep it in their pants. That seems to be just as true in Uruguay as it is everywhere else in the world. Those are throw-away observations in deeper novels, but they seem to be the whole point of Mairal’s novel. Despite Mairal’s fluid prose and evocative descriptions of Uruguay, he offers little in The Woman from Uruguay that is fresh or exciting.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Council of Animals by Nick McDonell

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on July 20, 2021

Novels that attribute human speech and characteristics to animals are often intended to shed light on the human condition. I suppose the same might be said of Warner Brothers cartoons. In any event, the nonhuman characters in The Council of Animals judge humans from an animal perspective. The verdict is mixed.

The novel imagines that all animals can speak to each other using a common language called Grak. The animals meet in a council to decide how they should respond to an undefined event known as the Calamity. The Calamity destroyed the ecosystem. Some forests turned to plastic. All creatures suffered, but the outcome was disastrous for humans, few of whom are still alive.

In theory, the council consists of one representative of each species in the Animal Kingdom. In practice, only a few representatives attend the meeting. Too much political representation, after all, is unwieldy. The job of attendees is to decide the fate of the remaining humans. Some animals favor eating them. Others would let them live. In a Shakespearean moment, a bear cradles a skull and thinks: “Humanity or not? I voted for them before. But whether they are worth the struggle, or only chew toys? Better to take my diurnal death, and hibernate, and perhaps dream of honey.”

The story of the council meeting and its aftermath is told by an historian. “History is a dark tale that doesn’t wag,” the historian tells us. The council meeting is attended by a horse, a bear, a baboon, a dog, a cat, and a crow. The dog once accompanied a human General in a war against people who, for reasons the dog cannot comprehend, forbade bacon. The dog generally likes humans, as dogs do, but is easily distracted by thrown sticks. The cat also favors humans but, as cats do, has its own agenda. According to the cat, “It is better to accept what cannot be changed, and pee on it.” The baboon doesn’t like humans at all and is rather Machiavellian in his manipulation of the horse. The crow is lost in his eccentric religion; nothing much matters to the bird except the Great Egg.

Eventually a few of the animals decide to make contact with the surviving humans, having heard a rumor that one of them speaks grak. They meet a boy who overcomes his misery by reading. The historian tells us that the boy loses himself in books that convey “not only the pain of life but some of its joy, some of our pleasures, whether sleeping in the sunshine, hearing the final notes of a blue sheep aria, or knowing, for a little while, the mind of another animal.” The story follows the group’s progress and eventually leads to a confrontation, followed by an amusing resolution.

Nick McDonell uses birds to satirize religion. He employs the entire Animal Kingdom to suggest that humans are not the only species to experience prejudice. Insects and rodents are rather put off by the failure of other animals to give them respect. A scorpion complains that mammals are no better than insects but will never be fair. A baboon complains that baboons “are not a monolith. Species does not determine what an animal thinks.”

Another similarity between animals and humans is the propensity of some (but not all) toward violence and authoritarianism. “We evolved to eat each other,” laments the historian. Leaders arouse the violent tendencies of their followers to cement their power. The historian wonders why we are “continually surprised by the rapacity, violence, and arrogance of those creatures who ascent to leadership.”

The novel leads to an ending that might be described as cute, perhaps because there were few possible endings to the story that a reader might be willing to accept. The Council of Animals doesn’t have the political significance of Animal Farm or the world-building complexity of Watership Down, but it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is — a quirky allegorical story that uses animals to remind humans of our foibles. In that regard, it resembles last year’s Talking Animals, another book about anthropomorphic animals that won my admiration.

RECOMMENDED

Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge

Published in China in 2006; published in translation by Melville House on July 13, 2021

Strange Beasts of China was written and published while Yan Ge was living in China, which might explain why the book reads as if she used metaphors drawn from fantasy to avoid censorship. Her criticism of authoritarian rule is indirect but unmistakable. In one chapter, for example, the government operates a fantastic scheme that coerces the loyalty of the middle class, creating “an unquestioning devotion” to their rulers “that would never be overturned.” The scheme comes at a price, as the ruler “wins over his people, but only when they have lost their minds. . . . Is this gaining or losing? No one can say.” An authoritarian mind might accuse Yan of being subversive if she made her criticism any plainer. An American reader might think about how authoritarian rulers in the United States encourage reality denial, a form of lunacy that assures the unquestioning loyalty of their voters. Notwithstanding that theme, the book is not primarily concerned with political governance.

Each chapter in Strange Beasts of China introduces a new beast. Yan makes a point of telling us that each type of beast is very like a human despite their distinguishing characteristics. One type of beast has gills behind the ears. One type has coarse and “mottled black” skin. One is grown like a sapling that eventually takes on human form. One lives underground where bodies are buried. They tend to be male and female but they don’t always reproduce in conventional ways. Some types are violent and other are passive. The beasts are a diverse group, a fact the fictional city of Yong’an should (and sometimes does) celebrate, but the differences that distinguish beasts from humans also cause discomfort among the city’s homogenous human population. The beasts tend to be tribal, sticking to their own, although some types are admired by humans. Some of those are prized as possessions. Others are feared and, thanks to human efforts, are bordering on extinction.

The novel’s narrator is a writer whose stories about beasts (as well as food columns and trashy romance stories) are published in a local newspaper. While each chapter incorporates a different kind of beast into the narrative, the book reads as a novel because of the larger story that runs through the chapters. That story belongs to the narrator. She is a lonely woman, “truly scared. In all the vastness of the city, I don’t have a single blood relative, no family at all.” Her friends die or leave or enter asylums or turn against her. She is depressed. "For many years now," she writes, "I hadn’t felt anything like joy.” As the chapters unfold, she learns truths (or potential truths, as objective truth is never quite clear) about her own identity. Her parents, friends, and former lovers have all deceived her at some point. She is frightened of how easily she believed them, how she imagined she was loved. But maybe she was loved by others, people whose love she failed to recognize.

When she isn’t chasing after strange beasts, the narrator spends much of her time drinking and feeling sorry for herself at the Dolphin Bar. A recurring story line involves the narrator’s complex and evolving relationship with the zoology professor who took a special interest in her for reasons that are initially obscure, and maintained that interest — or perhaps maintained an interest in emotionally abusing her — after she dropped out of college and became a writer. A later story line adds a younger man, also a favored student of the professor, who maintains an ambiguous relationship with the narrator — a relationship that, like all relationships, the narrator finds confusing.

Yan seems to have a dual purpose, illustrating how distant individuals are from each other (“You don’t know my story, and I don’t know yours. We poured our hearts into our own stories, but never shared them with each other.”) while illuminating the close connections between people who seem to have nothing in common. Perhaps the narrator is a strange beast. Perhaps everyone is. When the narrator asks whether love is possible between humans and beast, she is really asking whether love is possible between two humans who can never really know each other.

A wry humor infects the novel, evident (for example) in Yan’s descriptions of the varying preferences of the different types of beasts (Joyous Beasts “enjoy fantasy novels, and hate Maths”; Heartsick Beasts enjoy steamed buns and char siu pork while Impasse Beasts survive on a diet of human despair). Yet the novel’s themes, including depression and loneliness, death (by suicide, by murder, by fate), oppression, prejudice, and the apparent impossibility of understanding ourselves, much less another person, are far from light. Yan achieves a fine balance of comedy and tragedy.

At times, Yan states the obvious, or perhaps the meaningless, as if she is stating something profound. At other times, she expresses deep thoughts that, if not entirely original, are provocative because of the original way in which they are showcased. The last chapter, an attempt to reimagine the entire novel, falls flat. The novel as a whole, however, is creative, surprising, and enjoyable.

RECOMMENDED

The Heathens by Ace Atkins

Published by ‎ G.P. Putnam's Sons on July 13, 2021

In his usual masterful style, Ace Atkins constructs a story from multiple perspectives, then accelerates the pace in the second half by shifting rapidly among the plot threads, creating the sense of simultaneous action on multiple fronts. He does that without sacrificing characterization. In fact, The Heathens is one of the best installments of the Quinn Colson series, precisely because Atkins develops the personality of a key secondary character in surprising depth while telling an engaging story.

The story’s focus is on a teenage girl named TJ Byrd. TJ has always been a troublemaker, but Atkins makes the reader sympathize with her delinquent nature. There aren’t many roads to a happy life for a girl who needs to raise her younger brother while her mother is making one bad decision after another, typically involving drugs and abusive men. Gina’s latest bad choice is Chester Pratt, who sees Gina (and indirectly TJ) as the solution to his debt problem. Pratt is the last straw for TJ, who takes her little brother and hits the road with her boyfriend, Ladarius McCade, and her best friend, Holly Harkins.

The disreputable sheriff in a neighboring county happens upon a dismembered body that has been soaking in a barrel of bleach. Quinn, the sheriff of Tibbehah County, enlists the help of his former deputy and current US Marshal, Lily Virgil, to identify the remains. As Gina’s lifelong friend, Lily recognizes a tattoo that confirm Gina’s identity as a murder victim.

Since TJ is on the run, she becomes the prime suspect, a suspicion that Pratt does his best to fuel. Quinn isn’t convinced of TJ’s guilt, but Pratt has an alibi. As Quinn conducts his investigation in Tibbehah County, Lily follows TJ’s path into Arkansas and Louisiana. TJ is pretty easy to follow, given the trail of stolen cars and burgled houses she and Ladarius leave in their wake. TJ meets a disgruntled princess named Chastity in one of those houses who turns TJ into an Instagram sensation. Telling your story on Instagram turns out to be a bad way of traveling on the down low.

The series’ recurring villain (the one who is still alive, at any rate) is Johnny Stagg. He plays a role in the unfolding events, but the most villainous characters are a father and son thug team named Daddy and Dusty Flem. Most of Colson’s evil characters are corrupt and violent, but Daddy and Dusty are unthinking and unfeeling monsters. Yet they are just as realistic as more nuanced villains who have bedeviled Quinn in earlier novels.

Quinn’s wife and her son, as well as Quinn's new baby, his mother and his friend Boom Kimbrough play their expected parts, reminding the reader of Quinn’s fundamental decency and the difficult times he has overcome. But the novel’s star is TJ, who fights for her freedom and survival, battles her emotions and forces herself to be brave for her bother’s sake because he has no one else. She’s a strong, sympathetic, but vulnerable character, instantly likeable because she won’t tolerate being abused, even if — as any girl of 16 would — she makes some immature choices along the way.

The reason Gina was killed isn’t necessarily what the reader will expect. There is a bit of a whodunit plot mixed with a fast-moving action story as various characters try to be the first to find TJ — some of whom do not have her best interests at heart. Atkins mixes his characteristic humor into the story with throwaway lines like TJ’s brother’s description of his mother’s death: “She’s up there in heaven with Jesus and Dale Earnhardt.” Atkins continues the noir atmosphere of corruption, degradation, and hypocrisy that he has established throughout the series. All of the novels in this series are good but the effort that Atkins put into TJ makes The Heathens one of his best.

RECOMMENDED

Ascension by Oliver Harris

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Mariner Books on July 13, 2021

Ascension is the second Elliot Kane spy novel and the better of the two. It combines crime and suspense with themes of espionage. The result is an unusual but fascinating story that unfolds on a desolate island in the South Atlantic.

Oliver Harris informs the narrative with the history of Ascension Island, a place that few have visited and that even fewer want to see again. Ascension is governed by the British and is valued as a strategic jumping off point when the Brits find the need to invade the Falklands. The BBC maintains a relay station on Ascension. The European Space Agency maintains a rocket tracking station there, as did NASA for a period of time. The US has an air base on Ascension and the US Space Force uses it for whatever Space Force does. Thanks to Darwin, the arid volcanic island now has some trees, but Harris makes clear that it isn’t a place where anyone would want to spend a vacation. The novel gets its noir atmosphere from the island’s bleak nature and despondent residents.

The island has been used as a relay station for underwater cables for more than a century. Harris, who obviously engaged in meticulous research to support his novel, uses the cables as a jumping off point. A new transatlantic cable is being installed in Ascension. British intelligence wants to tap into it because there’s no such thing as privacy. Of course, the Brits don’t want the Americans to know what they’re doing.

Kathryn Taylor, who runs the South Atlantic desk for MI6, gives communications specialist Rory Bannatyne a cover story and sends him to Ascension to execute the cable-tapping plan. Taylor worked with Bannatyne when he was tapping a cable on Oman. Taylor bribed Bannatyne’s way out of trouble in Oman after he became uncomfortably close with some minors. Taylor never reported the incident to MI6, which is why Bannatyne is still available for the job. Unfortunately for Taylor, Bannatyne apparently commits suicide shortly after a young girl on Ascension goes missing.

Taylor sends Kane to Ascension to find out what happened to Bannatyne, whether he had anything to do with the missing girl, and whether it is safe to continue the cable intercept operation. Kane is undercover as an historian. Since there is only one flight to Ascension per month, Kane knows he will be there a while. When he arrives, however, he discovers that the hotel where he booked a room has closed, forcing him to take up residence in the home that was just vacated by the parents of the missing girl.

Kane’s investigation brings him into contact with a teenage boy who is suspected of murdering the missing girl. The boy’s mother is a General in a branch of the American military. After Kane befriends the General’s husband, a second girl goes missing. Kane is suspected of kidnapping the girl because he has befriended an unpopular family and, since he’s new on the island, he’s a convenient suspect. What seems to be an interesting crime story later changes gears as Kane discovers that the island is keeping secrets that may imperil the national security of Great Britain and its allies. Kane’s life and Taylor’s career are both threatened as suspense builds in England and on Ascension.

Harris’s intelligent plot is meticulously constructed. Its eventual destination will keep most readers guessing.

Taylor is the kind of character who is a fixture in espionage fiction, a spy who defies orders because she knows something is rotten and doesn’t trust her superiors to resolve the problem. Kane seems to be a more emotionally complex character in Ascension than he was in A Shadow Intelligence. Maybe he’s just growing on me. In any case, while most spy novels follow a well-traveled path, Harris has, for the second time, found a new story to tell. His second effort proves that he’s earning a position as a top shelf spy novelist.

RECOMMENDED