Eloy Urroz, The Obstacles. Ezra Fitz, translator. Dalkey Archive Press, 1996/2006.
I pulled this book out of the box and found price tags on the cover. $13.95 from Green Apple Books in San Francisco marked down to 91 cents.
I like the metafictional conceit that structures the book: two characters who are writers, each writing a work about a writer who, in a Twilight Zone-like arc, turns out to be the other writer. Ricardo is from Mexico City, and he has written a novel called Las Rémoras, a fictional town in Baja California Sur, focused on the character Elias, who is a writer and lives in the town library. Conversely, Elias, from the fictional town of Las Rémoras in Baja California Sur, is writing about a character named Ricardo, who is from Mexico City and has written a novel Las Rémoras. Initially, because the novel starts with Ricardo who lives in a real place, Mexico City, I assumed that he was the main focalizer occupying the primary, or the most verisimilar, level of fiction in the novel. Because the character Ricardo creates Elias and Las Rémoras–fictions within a fiction–I assumed that Elias was a secondary focalizer and creator with less agency, since he is the product of Ricardo’s imagination, living, acting, and writing as the product of the character Ricardo’s literary imagination. Elías’s writings are not his own, and he is thus less verisimilar than Ricardo, because he is twice removed from the realm of “real” authorship.
But part way through the novel, Ricardo feels the need to escape Mexico City, and he journeys by train and ferry to Baja California Sur to visit the fictional city of Las Rémoras. In La Paz, a real city in BCS he encounters one of his characters, Elias’s lover Roberta, who is escaping Las Rémoras. He knows her but not fully as she reveals aspects and experiences of which he was unaware. Even more surprising, she knows about his life, as if she had read about it, and has opinions about his actions and choices. Later, as Ricardo tries to buy a bus ticket to Las Rémoras but cannot because, as the ticket agent tells him, no such town exists, two more characters, Solón and Cecilio, find him at the bus station and drive him to Las Rémoras. Elías is writing Ricardo’s visit, and he uses Solón and Cecilio as Ricardo’s transportation. If at the beginning of the novel, there seems a clear division and hierarchy between creators (Urroz→Ricardo→Elías), as the novel progresses the divisions blur more and more, and everyone and everything are as real or fictional, creative or created, as everyone and everything, including the author, Eloy Urroz, who may or may not be a fictive amalgamation.
As much as I like the metafictional shenanigans of The Obstacles, there is much that I don’t like about it, for it is a novel built on stories of male sexual obsession or, to put it more clearly, a man’s obsession with a woman (love? lust? self-discovery? fate?). The obsessions are those of the fictional writers, Ricardo and Elías, as well as those of many of their male characters. The novel reads like a network of obsession stories: Man obsesses over his mother; man obsesses over his aunt; man obsesses over a prostitute(2 examples); man obsesses over a maid; man obsesses over a neighbor woman; man obsesses over a gringa; man obsesses over a nun. None of these obsessions end well (disappointment, tragedy, death), but they are the primary motives for the action and all the writings in the novel. Writers must write out their obsessions or others’ obsessions, and to read stories of others’ obsessions is the best! This is a man’s book about what men do. Women are, of course, objectified. They hardly have any agency and hardly speak, and the few times Urroz has a few of his female characters speak and develop into characters rather than functioning as projections of male fantasy they don’t last very long in the novel. Too much of the time, male obsession here washes out and flattens the fictive world. Also, the obsessions strip the male character of most everything but what comes out of the obsession: longing, regret, loss, tragedy.
Having said all this, there are moments in the book when characters are forced out of their obsessing mind sets to actually deal with the world. When Ricardo flees Mexico City to Baja California Sur, Urroz includes lots of details of Ricardo negotiating the trip, from the minibus to the train station to the train to the ferry. In such passages, the novel lightens, and the perspective broadens beyond the confines of so many obsessions. These passages are a nice relief, but they only temporarily interrupt the flow of obsession stories. By the end, though, the stories have become melodramatic and overwrought, the stuff of telenovelas. In the final chapter, it is revealed that Elías and Ricardo are half brothers!!! Their father is the town priest in Las Rémoras, Agosto Roldán, who is also a writer. His story “A Conversion Chronicle,” is about how his obsession with an American girl, Jenny, led to God’s intervention, his conversion, and a son, Elías. This is followed by Roldán’s deathbed confession of a second obsession/indiscretion that resulted in a second son, Ricardo. The narrative lens zooms in and out quickly, mimicking the emotional shockwaves.
After the funeral of their father, Ricardo and Elías skip town in a stolen car, brainstorm blending their two works into a single novel called The Obstacles but attributed to a single author, whose nom de plume is Eloy Urroz. Afterwards, they stop the car and walk out into the desert and pee in the sand together before getting back in the car and heading into their future. Sealing the deal, I guess. Did I mention they have a woman with them? Her name is Pili, and she made it possible for them to steal the car, although she doesn’t drive it. She wants escape Las Rémoras, because she does not want to marry the man her family has set her up with. She acts, she speaks a little, and she escapes, but she doesn’t join Elías and Ricardo in their pissing in the desert bonding ritual. Probably just as well.