Juan de Recacoechea's Bolivian noir

An interesting afterword follows Juan de Recacoechea's American Visa, about which I posted a comment last week. The writer and teacher Ilan Stavans, one of whose students translated American Visa from Spanish into English, calls Recacoechea's style "picaresque noir." I won't be giving away too much if I say both terms of the description fit. The novel is a kind of travelogue, its protagonist's observations on La Paz in the 1990s perhaps reflecting the author's own impressions after he returned to Bolivia from two decades working in Europe.

Stavans calls American crime fiction Recacoechea's "prime stimulation," and he notes the author's references to Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, and movies based on their work. The novel is also akin in temperament to David Goodis' work in a way that might surprise some readers familiar only by reputation with that prototypical noir writer.

I'm less certain of Stavans' assertion that the Mexican crime novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II is probably Recacoechea's main regional model. Yes, both authors take harsh looks at large Latin American cities (Taibo's Hector Belascoaran Shayne is a private investigator in Mexico City.) Both offer stark depictions of societies that crush their poor, their dispossessed, and even their ordinary workers. Yet, unlike Taibo, Recacoechea and his first-person protagonist, Mario Alvarez, never speechify. And that made Recacoechea a bit easier to read for this son of the bourgeoisie.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Juan de Recacoechea
Bolivian crime fiction
David Goodis

Bolivian noir ...

... or "sweet noir," as one review called American Visa by Juan de Recacoechea. A hundred pages in, that seems a fair description of the 1994 novel, newly translated into English.

The narrator/protagonist proclaims his love of Raymond Chandler and Chester Himes, but American Visa seems closer in form to Jorg Fauser's The Snowman or Night Bus by Giampiero Rigosi. In each, a central character, down on his luck but not yet desperate, falls into a series of wanderings, mostly or entirely in cities, that are part adventure story, part travelogue. Each book's lively eye for its surroundings manages to keep it oddly upbeat despite the straitened or dangerous circumstances in which the protagonists find themselves.

In American Visa, the adventure is Mario Alvarez's quest for a visa to visit his son in Miami. Alvarez travels from his small town to La Paz, "a city I struggled to recognize; half a million hungry peasants had changed its face. These immigrants from the sterile Andean plateau had taken over La Paz's higher-elevation neighborhoods, like ants swarming over a beehive. A wild rustling accompanied their movements. This gray, unruly mass transformed the entire city into a gigantic marketplace."

Of course, an immigrant of a kind is what Alvarez himself is trying to become, a hope more difficult than in the past for a Bolivian trying to get to the United States because, as one character says, "They think we're all potential drug traffickers." The remark is plucky but rueful, rich with possibility of adventure but also tragedy. I'll be back later to tell you how the story turns out.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Juan de Recacoechea
Bolivian crime fiction