Pedro Mairal: surviving in a dystopian society

From time to time, extraordinary novels such as ‘Sobre héroes y tumbas’ appear in Argentine literature. Ernesto Sabato now publishing house Libros del Asteroide is taking back Pedro Mairal’s ‘Year of the Desert’, the author’s second novel, first published in 2005 in Argentina, where the state of social collapse threatens the city of Buenos Aires. The narrative shows how the revolution of new technologies stopped working in the 21st century, apartment occupations took place, demonstrations of discontent took place on the streets, and the government began to mobilize conscription for conscription. On the other hand, the protagonist of Mairal’s successful novels ‘A night with Sabrina Love’ and ‘La Uruguaya’, Maria ValdesA young twenty-three-year-old secretary working in an investor’s office in a skyscraper in the capital city of Buenos Aires.

Unlike his best-known novels, in the places mentioned above “One Night with Sabrina Love”In ‘La Uruguaya’, a road movie, an instructive novel for a young character going to college soon, and ‘La Uruguaya’, the story of an impossible love for a forty-year-old protagonist traveling to Montevideo, and from where, from his adventure in Uruguay Let’s just say it will come out burnt out, but in ‘A Year in the Desert’ the main character is a woman, a fantastical realism tale to critique economic crises. bad governments and businessmen who want to take their money to tax havens to avoid paying taxes, alluding to tax haven companies that plague societies, which, as the protagonist sarcastically puts it, are involved in money laundering. Mairal introduces the element of Cainite in this novel that confronts the state and federal capital. For the Spanish reader, it can be interpreted as: a universal criticismand it’s not just Argentina in the war that has manifested itself in the containment of the coronavirus in 2008, then in 2020, and recently Russia invaded Ukraine, as several economic crises have occurred in Spain in the last fifteen years. With the rest of the continent unleashed price inflation.

Mairal uses the main character as the narrator, a direct style, a non-linear narration time due to the previous episode. “Suarez and Baitos”, where the protagonist tells a time in the future and then begins a long flashback that is the story. Mairal is characterized by an agile narrative rhythm where the protagonist waits for someone to come and arrest him, as if playing the Argentine song ‘El matador’. Rhythm is the distinguishing element that distinguishes a good narrative from the others, and yet the reader need not wait for page eighty to learn about the literary conflict, but it is present from the first pages, something oppressive. threatening everyone at once, like in a fairy tale ‘The house has been taken’ citizen’s cortazar, where a force takes over a house, until its inhabitants leave one room, then another, and so on until they finally get out. Mairal’s hero also sees his home being invaded, although by people of flesh and blood and at first by unknown persons.

The author of this novel somehow reminds us with the events of the narrative that takes place in it. russeau The ‘Social Contract’, in his work ‘The Social Contract’, justifying his justification for the absence of the citizen state, i.e., against moral misery, where the human spirit sometimes taken for granted, which is now called failed states, disappears. This novel allows us to see that literature is not just about mastering the written language, but also about the meaning that a story represents.