Una calle llamada Tania / Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez

A Street Named Tania


When the decade of the nineties opens there are at least three tendencies coexisting within Venezuelan literature: the exhausted romantic epic of the sixties; the depressive withdrawal of the short story of the following years and the anecdotal populism of certain fiction writers from the late eighties. It is true that a few fundamental texts had been appearing throughout those years, titles that transcended general panoramas, managing to establish themselves as brilliant and solid proposals. I’m thinking of books such as Confidencias del Cartabón by Iliana Gómez Berbesi (1981); Setecientas palmeras plantadas en el mismo lugar (1974) and Percusión (1982) by José Balza; Los platos del diablo (1985) by Eduardo Liendo, but the general climate evoked was of an oppressive, asphyxiating house, as though Venezuelan fiction were condemned to never surpass the glimpses of projection and acknowledgment it experienced in the sixties with works of great magnitude such as those of Salvador Garmendia and Adriano González León.

Writing during those years seemed a melancholic exercise, a task condemned to incomprehension, to indifference. The word “crisis” seemed to be repeated over and over, as though there were no opening from within critical circles toward the new names that could have been emerging at the time.

But then Calletania appeared, the novel that Ediciones Periférica has now released in Europe.

The positive response was immediate; readers reacted with enthusiasm; critics responded effusively and its author, Israel Centeno, won the prize for best book of fiction published during the year [1992] in that Caribbean country.

Optimistic airs then moved through a generation of authors who understood that the space of their creation needed to have the size of an infinite literary ambition, unconstrained by the claustrophobic limits of Venezuelan literary history, attuned instead to the ensemble of the Spanish language and (why not?) that of world literature. Centeno gathered moments from his country’s tradition: certain atmospheres from Guillermo Meneses; a particular vision of the urban from Salvador Garmendia himself; the constructive precision of Gustavo Díaz Solís; but he also combined them with an intelligent reinterpretation of Raymond Carver, with the viscosity of Onetti’s worlds and Juan Marsé’s expressive force.

Calletania took up once again themes belonging to fiction from the sixties: political struggle, politicized intellectuality, life in marginal zones, but with a new vision. A vision of disenchantment, tenuously parodic, soberly ferocious. Yesterday’s dreams now appeared like a crude masquerade; a circus that resulted in compassion and the ridiculous. The narrative thread was tensed thanks to a succession of blocks where, little by little, the presence of a real but hallucinated world was drawn with precision, a recognizable world that bifurcated between territories of what was lived and dreamed.

With this novel Israel Centeno managed to regain a certain branch of Venezuelan fiction’s own universes and transform them as one might turn a sock inside out. Faced with the unrestricted heroism and kindness of characters with a social conscience, faced with the stone cardboard epic, a more believable, more human texture appeared, uneven and eroded.

But this text did much more than that, because the result of its attempt was the construction of one of the great Latin American novels of recent years; an attempt that when seen today as a global proposal within the Spanish language, rises like a vital fresco suffused with vigor, enchantment and literary virtuosity.

Throughout its 167 pages Calletania draws the din of an urban universe in which its characters are subjected to erosion, to the undermining of its silhouettes, since the city’s frenetic time, the story’s time is a monster that devours (fiercely, but also with pleasure) the totality of the materials it finds in its path.

Perhaps that devouring movement might explain one of the fundamental elements of this narrative piece: its capacity of absorption, its magnetism, as if we readers were also being devoured by the years, by the written city, by the story itself. Calletania’s pages grow from a force of attraction that pushes the reader forward, as if a pole of energy were drawing one closer with slow but sure clarity.

But it’s not an effect achieved with the clichés of those light novels that tie together action-packed televised situations. Calletania propels the rhythms of its actions only in its final pages. The rest of the time the novel moves on two planes: one is the public space, a shantytown where little by little the elements of a great confrontation between drug dealers and far left political activists who have decided to act as a moral phalanx are insinuated; and another is the intimate space of various characters seen within their individuality, outlined through their relationship with their houses: a shanty they call El Faro; the house of shadowy worlds where a girl named Tania will be crushed by time; a Colonel’s house where the ghosts of an ancient military dictatorship remain.

That oscillation gives the novel body and musculature. The complexity of this work of fiction spreads out along its exterior surface and in its subtler intimacy. The actions move from one point to another creating and asphyxiating tension, a potential explosion we intuit at each paragraph.

The close of this novel that up to now has advanced sustained by the continuous unfolding of the characters (phantasmal, historical, mythical revelations) leads toward the unifying condensation of a defeat, of an accepted defeat. And thus we witness a compact, indispensable narrative text; a great moment in the genre of late 20th century fiction.




{ Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez, La Opinión de Tenerife, 8 June 2009 }

Calletania

Israel Centeno’s first book is the novel Calletania, originally published in Caracas in 1992 by Monte Ávila Editores. That same year it won the CONAC (Consejo Nacional de la Cultura) prize for best novel. The story concerns various friends in the neighborhood of Catia (Western Caracas) in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Berlin wall, former communist revolutionaries, some transformed into gangsters, others disenchanted and wrapped in solitary obsessions. Such as Coronel, whose marriage to the intellectual, revolutionary Marta is falling apart, though his lover the actress Raiza visits him at the beach, where he goes to escape for a night, a house left to him by his father, whose presence as a ghost among many that inhabit the beach cottage makes the novel a Shakespearean globe, self-enclosed and insular. A third lover, Tania of the book’s title, serves as a muse/hallucination that Coronel maintains in his semi-detached breakdown. Caracas is portrayed through a single city block in Catia, the possibility of revolution, socialism and its theories are lived, discussed and predicted by various characters, a single impulse over two days in the universal city.

The Spanish publishing house Editorial Periférica (scroll down) has just published a new edition of Calletania, making the book available again (though mainly in Europe). This is the third in their republications of Centeno’s earlier work. The contrast between the novel’s particular universe and Venezuela’s current political labyrinth isn’t coincidental, as much of Centeno’s Calletania carries a prophetic tone when read from our present situation. Socialism is the central idea enacted and debated in these pages, without losing literature’s sense of play and didactic purpose. Though, finally, it’s the book’s language that enchants with its routine elegance:


“Nights in the neighborhood are yellow. They’re illuminated by tall iron streetlights lost in the early afternoon light, in the density of midnight, in dawn’s lightness. The slow voices of drunkards have remained bundled in the corners. The storefront doors make noise, automobile engines, the rain of bathrooms, cocks crowing, the echo of a few steps and the shadow of the man who steps. Washed, clean like this day that breathes, still undefined, because it’s too dark to see the sun, even though we’ve left behind the night’s dense world.” (101)