Preface written for the excellent novel: Anotaciones a la Banana Republic (Marcel Jaentschke)
David Gambarte
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Preface of Anotaciones a la Banana Republic (blog link)
by David Gambarte
Translation by Gabriel Setright
The facts that make up the thread of this preface can be traced to a now distant and absolutely fascinating reading of the diary of a sublime character.Contradictory. Wonderful. Having been a great friend Salvador Dalí, object of extreme devotion and alleged by Federico Garcia Lorca, held in a passage of his Diario de un Genio (Diary of a Genius) that Lorca was not killed by his political condition, but by his sexual and personal condition. The political man lives on the outsides of the Literary Man, because, according to Dalí, the literary condition of Lorca dominated man above every facet. Lorca was a poet above everything and above everyone. A maximum poet.
Beyond the harshness by which one can judge this assertion of a Spanish and Republican point of view in the first half of the twentieth century, it seems that it is not unreasonable to affirm that the Spanish genius intended to exalt the figure of the artist over their political and social fitness. It is, somehow, a statement of contradictions in which the genius and his sensitivity stand out above any other facet.
Years later I received an email from a young writer and no stranger, called Marcel Jaentschke. I had met Marcel in some poetry readings and other environments of dubious scholarship (I am convinced that scholarship needs to be doubtful in order to be real. The intellectual element has to be linked to the foolish and shameless element, that at least some of us, carry inside), and I held him in high literary esteem. Always, since the beginning, I was impressed by his poetic capacity. In that email Marcel asked me if I was willing to write the prologue to his first novel and, in a fit of madness, I said yes without having read even one page of it. This fit did not led me to a mistake.
Annotations to the Banana Republic is a story of hasty intellectual courage ranging between fiction and testimony. The disturbing evolution of the stories that make up the novel; the big story that could well be the broken mirror of many other similar stories in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, on the anchurian analogy of Honduras, the carverian (1) bewilderment that the reader experiences in many sections of the novel; remain at all times under the control of the worship of literature and the author’s prodigious ability to describe the horror, uncertainty, power, hypocrisy, gender, and human stupidity.
A photograph of the slow decay of a society that survives itself with the same resignation that is shown by the character of El Frenton when asked why continue to sell drugs when he could get away from this dark business, whom responds that he is convinced he was born to sell drugs. All are victims of a social sinking. Of the Narco and his bare fingers. Fingers that touch all corners of society.
Virtue is evident in some characters. This is reflected in the terrible fear, in full consciousness of the falling into a kind of hell by Lowry (2). The fear in Maria Victoria Flores, the fear in Ricardo, the fear in Alvaro Flores. Where salvation lives far away in the devastating escape.
(David Gambarte, reading the Preface of Annotations to the Banana Republic, during the launching of the book, at Kino K-13, Helsinki, Finland)
This text is uninhibitedly metaliterary. Maria Victoria Flores talks with the father of her friend, Niina Hakkarainen. Conversations which underlying the well weighted figure of Carlos Martinez Rivas. (Aquí sólo tienes abismo. Aquí sólo hay un punto fijo: el pábilo quieto ardiendo y el halo frío.) (3) Repeatedly referred to by the acronym C.M.R. Conversations between Ernesto and Ricardo, two friends from a childhood that was both comfortable and Jesuit, acting as narrators of astonishing critical lucidity despite the excessive amount of drugs consumed along their dialogues. A list that would be perfectly suited to Umberto Eco. (4) A list that details the storm of the historical flow of Nicaraguan literature. And that concludes with a fantastic, obviously, and irreproachable direction: The most widely read book in the history of the young Nicaraguan republic: The Bible.
The author appears and disappears in a few characters into a kind of intermittent heteronimia that leaves traces of life. Traces of history. But perhaps there is a relationship of verses of Maria Victoria involving the breaking of the heteronymous mask. Verses evidently declared a state of modernity of the work, which is polyphonic for multiple formats in which it is presented, which is modern by direct and current account, which is poetic by the narrative rhythm.
Heinous crimes, rape, incest, pain, addictions that overcome class differences. An inventory of horrors that revolves around drug trafficking in Central America. The pain is felt by some, but the perversion belongs to everyone.
It all started on an average Saturday morning on a local radio show in Helsinki with two speakers and two guest poets. One of them was Marcel Jaentschke. It was his turn and he began to read a poem from his bookDilatada Republica de las Luces. Then I remembered that passage. I thought about Lorca saying poetry, sweating poetry, and defecating poetry. Marcel, standing, crying, in a room on fire. The prosaic stayed outside with the ones that escaped to survive.
Now, while I finish writing these lines, I remember an interview that was published recently with Rostworowksi Mary under the juicy (and true) title: books keep repeating the same nonsense of twenty or thirty years ago. (5)
This is not the case.
1. Concerning the sublime American storyteller Raymond Carver. Exponent of dirty realism;
2. Under the Volcano of Malcolm Lowry, his most famous novel. The only one I’ve read;
3. Verse of the Poem by Martinez Rivas, Las Virgenes Prudentes. The verses are not present in the work;
4. Umberto Eco defends his predilection for lists (enumerations), in his easy and fun book “Confesiones de un Joven Novelista”