Novela y revolución: Ana Teresa Torres / Gisela Kozak Rovero

Novel and Revolution: Ana Teresa Torres

Literature has testified to the strength of the socialist revolutionary myth in Venezuelan consciousness since the sixties in the 20th century until today. This violent passion has been incarnated in the Bolivarian Revolution but its roots are found in the 19th century, in the wars of independence, the civil wars and in the caudillos of rural and patriarchal lineage. Two great novels have explored this historical continuity between 19th-century militias, caudillos and guerrillas: País portátil, by Adriano González León, and Los últimos espectadores del acorazado Potemkin, by Ana Teresa Torres, recently reprinted by the prestigious Mexican publishing house Fondo de Cultura Económica. The extraordinary literary quality of both texts places them among the peaks of the novel in Venezuela and there exists between them a secret dialogue whose pertinence to the national present we must highlight. If País portátil took the pulse of our revolutionary myth as a desirable horizon, Los últimos espectadores del acorazado Potemkin reveals its tragic scars, its radical failure reflected in the mirror of our decadence as a country.

A man and woman without names, solitary regulars at a dive bar, engage in a dialogue about individual and collective pasts, a colloquium that combines with autobiographical text, a story with overtones of a romance novel with mythological and historical implications, love letters and interventions of journalistic and psychoanalytical style. The protagonist’s brother was a guerrilla fighter, with a brilliant amorous resume and a cinematic life, who begins with his admiration for a rural caudillo fallen on hard times, the general Pardo, an admiration moreover accompanied by a contemptuous view of his own father, a successful, orderly and hard-working immigrant. Toward the end of his life, this guerrilla embarks on a plan to assassinate the president.

The narratives that make up the novel correct and contradict one another. The grandiloquent autobiography of the guerrilla fighter, “La noche sin estrellas,” is questioned by his younger brother. The novel La segunda muerte de Eurídice is confronted with the protagonist’s version regarding the disappearance of his wife. The short story “Los subversivos” foreshadows the assassination attempt. A doubt corrodes this entire novel, the radical doubt of the characters regarding the revolutionary myth, national salvation and undeniable truths. This unredeemed left represented in the character of the guerrilla fighter today governs our country with the consequent institutional destruction and the contempt for the achievements of civilian life from the independence to the present. La herencia de la tribu, the title of a successful essay by Torres, emerges once more. In such difficult times for our country, a reading of Los últimos espectadores del acorazado Potemkin imposes itself as much for its literary quality as for its historical and social discernment.




{ Gisela Kozak Rovero, Tal Cual, 5 August 2011 }

Literatura venezolana o el país sin pasado / Gisela Kozak Rovero

Venezuelan Literature or the Country Without A Past

Judging by the publishing boom of recent years, people are reading more national authors than a decade ago. The reason is clear: the country now hurts more than ever amidst the grinding gears of the Bolivarian revolution.

Notwithstanding, readers seem to lean toward the historical or political essay, written by historians, journalists, analysts from various specialties, or toward biography (the collection published by El Nacional, the texts of historian Inés Quintero or the book by Alberto Barrera and Cristina Marcano on president Chávez). Surely novelists like Federico Vegas, Alberto Barrera and Francisco Suniaga have been able to achieve various new editions of their books and the choices offered by Venezuelan literature are more ample and diverse than ever, if we include private and public publishing houses. But there seems to be no audience, enough to absorb the offerings.

Faced with this situation, it’s best not to fool ourselves: dear reader, please forget about the low number of readers, the miseries of education, the reigning lack of culture or the evils of television. Sure, we read, but not our literature.

For example, more than forty thousand copies of the anniversary edition of Cien años de soledad by Gabriel García Márquez were sold. People read newspapers, magazines and also books by people involved with radio and TV like Leonardo Padrón, Oscar Yanes and Laureano Márquez.

Manuel Caballero, Inés Quintero and Elías Pino Iturrieta sell their history books; from another specialization, Rafael Arráiz Lucca has been successful with his panorama of Venezuelan history. People buy the Harry Potter adventures or Paulo Coehlo, a mix of religion and self-help with the barest trace of narrative. Examples abound, but I think these few are enough to make myself understood.

Literature is not a reference point in Venezuela. University students of Literature (although this is changing) don’t feel part of a tradition that functions as a legacy and, also, as a point of departure for introducing modifications. The interest in history books is a healthy political and intellectual tendency and a symptom of our ailments.

The key is in the past, yes, but this awareness doesn’t translate into a revaluation of the civil legacy to national life, but instead a return to history as an attempt to explain the Bolivarian revolution, an event whose enduring consequence should be that we propose to regain our political, social, economic, juridical, scientific and cultural conquests of the last two hundred years, to deepen and surpass them. We don’t read our literature because it doesn’t form part of our experience as Venezuelans; it’s not about a lack of quality but rather a national inability to see ourselves in the achievements of the past; an inability that collaborated with Chávez’s arrival to power.




{ Gisela Kozak Rovero, Tal Cual, 24 June 2008 }