Review of “Among Strange Victims” by Daniel Saldaña París, Christina MacSweeney (Translation) (ISBN 9781566894302)
Among Strange Victims has an unlovable protagonist who is content with his peeling walls and his boring daily rituals. He apparently told his family he was attending college but dropped out almost immediately. The description of his day is boring in the extreme, and unfortunately this does not make for good fiction. As he puts it, “one of my strengths is an ability to enjoy the most trivial situations intensely.” Sadly, most readers do not have this same strength.
Our lazy protagonist, who doesn’t even bother to identify himself at the beginning of his story, spends considerable time on a “disintegrating” bench in a gazebo, watching people. When he is not doing this he is working in a museum editing press releases and proofreading the catalog. In one chapter we learn how he goes to a cafe, has a cup of tea and returns home with the soggy tea bag, which he hangs on the wall. Gripping narrative – this is not. At about this point the reader is ready to stretch his arms a couple of thousand miles and and throttle the author.
By the time the narrator has accumulated ten teabags on his wall, still not much has happened in the story, which until now has been a tale of boredom, shirking, and masturbation. And then he decides to save the life of a hen in the vacant lot next door. He throws a table into the lot, and goes down to position it as a suitable shelter. Which is when he discovers a grisly bag full of putrefying viscera.
But now we once again enter stagnant waters when his co-worker Cecilia is sent a prank marriage proposal in his name, and she accepts. For the first time we learn the narrator’s name: Rodrigo Saldivar.
The book goes on in his way for many hundreds of thousands of keystrokes, each of them more painful than the one before. There is the mystery of a turd on his bed. Then we meet a BolaÒo type academic slumming in Mexico, an elusive and dissolute philosopher-boxer the academic is studying while living with the narrator’s mother, and a shady gringo who bought a nubile young girl whose urine is used for rituals.
In the end not much is resolved, although we do finally learn who has deposited the turd on the bed.
I am not sure if my quarrel is with the work itself or with the translation, but it is neither an easy nor a pleasant, nor a rewarding read. I have limited patience for writers who, rather than invite you into their heads and hearts, try to keep you at arm’s length or deposit turds on the pages of the book you bought from them. The book has an intellectual conceit, but it’s a rather shallow one.
BTW, if you want to see another sample of SaldaÒa ParÌs’s writing, which demonstrates more talent than this first disaster of a novel, here is a piece he wrote for Electric Literature:
For the giveaway pile.
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