Sodenstern was a cult author, and several of his novels had been adapted for the screen by the time he came to publish the last three, which recount Gunther O’Connell’s initiatory voyage toward the central territories of the American continent and his subsequent encounter with the mysterious leaders of the Fourth Reich. In The Bat-Gangsters, O’Connell and Flip cross the Rockies. In Anita, an aging O’Connell rediscovers love with a teenage replica of his old girlfriend Candace (the plot is a simple transposition of Sodenstern’s situation at the time: he was besotted, like a teenager, with a young UCLA student). And in A, O’Connell finally penetrates to the heart of the Fourth Reich, of which he is elected leader.
According to Sodenstern’s plans, the saga of O’Connell and the Fourth Reich was to comprise five novels. Of the final two only rough outlines and indecipherable lists have survived. The fourth, to be entitled The Arrival, would have narrated a long vigil: O’Connell, Flip, Anita and the members of the Fourth Reich awaiting the birth of a new Messiah. The final, untitled novel would probably have explored the consequences of the Messiah’s coming. In a file on his computer, Sodenstern noted that that the Messiah could be Flip’s son, but there is nothing to suggest that this was more than verbal doodling.
GUSTAVO BORDA
Guatemala, 1954–Los Angeles, 2016
Guatemala’s most talented and unfortunate science-fiction writer spent his childhood and teenage years in the countryside. His father was the overseer of an estate called Los Laureles, whose owners had a library, and there it was that Gustavo learned to read and first tasted humiliation. Both reading and humiliation were to be constant features of his life.
Borda preferred blondes, and his insatiable libido was legendary, provoking innumerable jokes and jeers. Given the ease with which he fell in love and took offense, his life was one long series of indignities, which he endured with the fortitude of a wounded beast. Anecdotes about his life in California abound (yet there are few about his life in Guatemala, where he came to be regarded, albeit briefly, as the nation’s great writer): it is said that he was a favorite target for all the sadists in Hollywood; that he fell in love with at least five actresses, four secretaries, and seven waitresses, every one of whom rejected him, deeply wounding his pride; that on more that one occasion he was brutally beaten up by the brothers, friends, or lovers of the woman in question; that his own friends took pleasure in getting him catatonically drunk and leaving him lying in a heap, wherever; that he was fleeced by his agent, his landlord, and his neighbor (the Mexican screenwriter and science-fiction author Alfredo de María); that his presence at meetings and conferences of North American science-fiction writers was a source of sarcastic, scornful amusement (Borda, as opposed to the majority of his colleagues, had not even a rudimentary knowledge of science; his ignorance in the fields of astronomy, astrophysics, quantum theory and information technology was proverbial); that his mere existence, in short, brought out the basest, most deeply hidden instincts in the people whose paths he crossed, for one reason or another, in the course of his life.
There is, however, no evidence to suggest that any of this demoralized him. In his Diaries he blames the Jews and usurers for everything.
Gustavo Borda was just over five feet tall; he had a swarthy complexion, thick black hair, and enormous very white teeth. His characters, by contrast, are tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed. The spaceships that appear in his novels have German names. Their crews are German too. The colonies in space are called New Berlin, New Hamburg, New Frankfurt, and New Koenigsberg. His cosmic police dress and behave like SS officers who have somehow managed to survive into the twenty-second century.
In other respects, Borda’s plots are entirely conventional: young men setting off on initiatory voyages; children lost in the immensity of the cosmos who encounter wise old navigators; stories of Faustian pacts with the devil; planets where the fount of eternal youth may be found; lost civilizations surviving in secret. . . .
He lived in Guatemala City and in Mexico, where he worked at all sorts of jobs. His first books went entirely unnoticed.
After the translation of his fourth novel, Unsolved Crimes in Force-City, into English, he became a professional writer, and moved to Los Angeles, where he was to spend the rest of his life.
In answer to a question about the puzzling abundance of Germanic elements in the work of a Central American author, he once said: “I have been tormented, spat on, and deceived so often—the only way I could go on living and writing was to find spiritual refuge in an ideal place . . . In a way, I’m like a woman trapped in a man’s body. . . .”
MAGICIANS, MERCENARIES AND MISERABLE CREATURES
SEGUNDO JOSÉ HEREDIA
Caracas, 1927–Caracas, 2004
A man of impetuous and passionate character, the young Segundo José Heredia was nicknamed Socrates because of his insatiable appetite for discussion and debate on all manner of topics. He preferred to compare himself, however, to Richard Burton and T.E. Lawrence, for like those authors, he too wrote tales of adventure, three to begin with: Sergeant P (1955), the story of a Waffen SS veteran lost in the Venezuelan jungle, where he offers his services to a community of missionary nuns in permanent conflict with the government, as well as with local Indians and adventurers; Night Signals (1956), a novel about the dawn of Venezuelan aviation, the research for which included learning not only to fly a prop plane but also to parachute; and The Confession of the Rose (1958), in which, forgoing the vast spaces of the Fatherland, the author confines the adventure to a mental hospital, and in fact to the patients’ minds, making abundant use of interior monologue, diverse points of view, and a forensic-medical jargon that was widely admired at the time.
In the following years he traveled around the world several times, directed two films and gathered around him in Caracas a group of young writers and critics, with whom he founded the magazine Second Round, a bimonthly devoted to the arts and certain sports (mountain climbing, boxing, rugby, football, horse racing, baseball, track and field, swimming, hunting, and game fishing) which were always examined from the writer’s or adventurer’s point of view, by the finest stylists Segundo José Heredia could muster.
In 1970 he published his fourth and final novel, which he considered his masterpiece: Saturnalia, the story of two young friends, who in the course of a week-long journey through France are confronted with the most horrendous acts they have ever witnessed, without being able to tell for sure whether or not they are dreaming. The novel includes scenes of rape, sexual and workplace sadism, incest, impaling, and human sacrifice in prisons crowded to the physical limit; there are convoluted murder plots in the tradition of Conan Doyle, colorful and realistic descriptions of every Paris neighborhood, and, incidentally, one of the most vivid and spine-chilling female characters in Venezuelan literature since 1950: Elisenda, the enemy of the two young men.
Saturnalia was banned for some time in Venezuela, and later reissued by two South American publishers, before lapsing into oblivion, with the author’s apparent consent.
In the sixties he founded the short-lived Aryan Naturist Commune (or “nudist colony,” as its detractors called it) near Calabozo, in the state of Guárico.
In his final years he attached little importance to his day-to-day life and none at all to his literary works.
AMADO COUTO
Juiz de Fora, Brazil, 1948–Paris, 1989
Couto wrote a book of stories, which all the publishers rejected. The manuscript went astray. Then he began work with the death squads, kidnapping, participating in torture and witnessing the killing of certain prisoners, but he went on thinking about literature, and specifically what it was that Brazilian literature needed. It needed avant-garde, experimental writing, a real shake-up, but not like the Campos brothers, they were boring, a pair of insipid professors, and not like Osman Lins, who was downright unreadable. (Why did they publish Osman Lins and not Couto’s stories?) No, something modern but more up his alley, a kind of crime thrill
er (Brazilian, though, not North American), a new Rubem Fonseca, in a word. Now there was a good writer; he was rumored to be a son of a bitch, but Couto was keeping an open mind. One day, while he was waiting in a field with the car, he had an idea: why not kidnap Fonseca and give him a going-over. He told his superiors and they listened. But the idea never came to fruition. Couto’s dreams were clouded and illuminated by the possibility of making Fonseca the focus of a real-life novel. The superiors had superiors in turn and somewhere up the chain of command Fonseca’s name evaporated—disappeared—but in the chain of Couto’s thoughts, the name continued to grow and accrue prestige, opening itself to his thrust, as if the name Fonseca were a wound and the name Couto a knife. He read Fonseca, he read the wound until it began to suppurate; then he fell ill and his colleagues took him to hospital, where they say he became delirious: he saw the great Brazilian crime thriller in a hepatology unit; he saw it in detail, the plot complete with set-up and resolution, and he saw himself in the Egyptian desert approaching the unfinished pyramids like a wave (he was the wave). So he wrote the novel and had it published. Entitled Nothing to Say, it was a crime thriller. The hero was called Paulinho. Sometimes Paulinho worked for certain gentlemen as a chauffeur, sometimes he was a detective, and sometimes he was a skeleton smoking in a corridor, listening to distant cries, a skeleton who visited every dwelling (no, in fact only middle-class dwellings and those of the seriously poor) but never came too close to the inhabitants. The novel was published on the Black Pistol list, which was made up of North American, French and Brazilian thrillers, the proportion of local titles having risen as funds to buy foreign rights ran short. His colleagues read the novel and almost all of them found it incomprehensible. By then they were no longer cruising in the car or kidnapping and torturing, although they did still occasionally kill. I have to dissociate myself from these people and be a writer, Couto wrote. But he was conscientious. Once he tried to meet Fonseca. According to Couto, they looked at each other. And Couto thought: He’s so old; he’s not Mandrake any more, or anybody else. But he would gladly have changed places with Fonseca, if only for a week. He also thought that Fonseca’s gaze was harder than his own. I live among pirañas, he wrote, but Don Rubem Fonseca lives in a tank full of metaphysical sharks. He wrote a letter to his hero, but received no reply. So he wrote another novel, The Last Word, published by Black Pistol, in which the return of Paulinho is a pretext for Couto to bare his soul to Fonseca, shamelessly, as if saying, Here I am, alone with my pirañas, while my colleagues drive around the city center in the small hours of the morning, like the Tonton Macoute who come to take bad children away . . . such are the mysteries of literature. And although he probably knew that Fonseca would never read his novels, he went on writing. In The Last Word more skeletons appear. Paulinho is a skeleton almost all day long. His clients are skeletons. The people he talks to, fucks and eats with (although he usually eats alone) are also skeletons. And in the third novel, The Mute Girl, the major cities of Brazil are like enormous skeletons, while the villages are like little children’s skeletons, and sometimes even the words are transformed into bones. After that Couto stopped writing. Someone told him that his colleagues from the patrol had begun to disappear, and fear took hold of him, or rather tightened its grip and entered his body. He tried to retrace his steps and find familiar faces, but everything had changed while he was writing. Certain strangers began to talk about his novels. One of them could have been Fonseca, but wasn’t. I had him in the palm of my hand, he noted in his diary before disappearing like a dream. He had gone to Paris, where he hanged himself in a room at the Hôtel La Grèce.
CARLOS HEVIA
Montevideo, 1940–Montevideo, 2006
Author of a monumental and largely unreliable biography of San Martín, in which, among other inaccuracies, the general is said to have been Uruguayan, Hevia also wrote stories, collected in the volume Seas and Offices, and two novels: Jason’s Prize, a fable suggesting that life on Earth is the result of a disastrous intergalactic television game show; and Montevideo—Buenos Aires, a novel about friendship, full of exhaustive all-night conversations.
He worked in television journalism, discharging lowly tasks for the most part, with occasional stints as a producer.
For some years he lived in Paris, where he became acquainted with the theories espoused by The Review of Contemporary History, which were to make a deep and lasting impression on him. He was a friend of the French philosopher Étienne de Saint Étienne, whose work he translated.
HARRY SIBELIUS
Richmond, 1949—Richmond, 2014
Harry Sibelius was prompted to write one of the most complex and dense works of his day (and possibly also one of the most futile) by his reading of Norman Spinrad and Philip K. Dick, and perhaps also by reflecting on a story by Borges. The novel, since it is a novel and not a work of history, is simple in appearance. It is founded on the following supposition: Germany, in alliance with Italy, Spain and the Vichy government in France, defeats England in the autumn of 1941. In the summer of the following year, four million soldiers are mobilized in an attack on the Soviet Union, which capitulates in 1944, except for pockets of sporadic resistance in Siberia. In the spring of 1946, European troops attack the United States from the East, while Japan invades from the West. In the winter of the same year New York falls, then Boston, Washington, Richmond, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The infantry and German Panzers cross the Appalachians; the Canadians withdraw to the interior; the United States government shifts its seat to Kansas City; and defeat is imminent on every front. The capitulation takes place in 1948. Alaska, part of California and part of Mexico are handed over to Japan. The rest of North America is occupied by the Germans. Harry Sibelius perfunctorily explains all these developments in a ten-page introduction (which is in fact little more than a list of key dates to give the reader historical points of reference), entitled “A Bird’s Eye View.” Then the novel proper—The True Son of Job—begins: 1,333 pages darkly mirroring Arnold J. Toynbee’s Hitler’s Europe.
The structure of the book is modeled on the work of the English historian. The second introduction (which is in fact the real prologue) is entitled “The Elusiveness of History,” exactly like Toynbee’s prologue. The following sentence from Toynbee expresses one of the pivotal themes of Sibelius’s introductory text: “The historian’s view is conditioned, always and everywhere, by his own location in time and place; and, since time and place are continually changing, no history, in the subjective sense of the word, can ever be a permanent record that will tell the story, once for all, in a form that will be equally acceptable to readers in all ages, or even in all quarters of the Earth.” Sibelius, of course, is animated by intentions of an entirely different nature. In the final analysis, the British professor’s aim is to testify against crime and ignominy, lest we forget. The Virginian novelist seems to believe that “somewhere in time and space” the crime in question has definitively triumphed, so he proceeds to catalogue it.
The first part of Toynbee’s book is entitled “The Political Structure of Hitler’s Europe,” which becomes, in Sibelius, “The Political Structure of Hitler’s America.” Both parts comprise six chapters, but where Toynbee’s account is factual, only a distorted reflection of reality is perceptible in Sibelius’s welter of stories. His characters, who sometimes seem to have stepped straight out of a Russian novel (War and Peace was one of his favorites) and sometimes to have escaped from an animated cartoon, move, speak and indeed live (although their lives have little continuity) in chapters that seem inhospitable to fiction, such as the fourth, “Administration,” in which Sibelius imagines in detail life in (1) the incorporated territories, (2) the territories under a chief of civil administration, (3) the appended territories, (4) the occupied territories, and (5) the “zones of operation.”
It is not unusual for Sibelius to spend twenty pages simply introducing a character, specifying his physical and moral traits, his tastes in food and sports, his am
bitions and frustrations, after which the character vanishes, never to be mentioned again in the course of the novel; while others, who are barely given names, reappear over and over, in widely separated locations, engaged in dissimilar if not incompatible or mutually exclusive activities. The workings of the bureaucratic machinery are described implacably. The 250 pages of the fourth chapter of the second part, “Transport,” subdivided into (a) Position of German Transport at the Outbreak of the War, (b) Effects of the Changing Military Situation on the German Transport Position, (c) German Methods of controlling Transport throughout America, and (d) German Organization of American Transport, are overwhelming for all but the specialist.
The stories are often borrowed, as are almost all the characters. In the third chapter of the second part, “Industry and Raw Materials,” we find Hemingway’s Harry Morgan and Robert Jordan, along with characters from Robert Heinlein and plot devices from Reader’s Digest. In the seventh chapter, “Finance,” section (b), “German Exploitation of Foreign Countries,” the informed reader will recognize a series of characters (sometimes Sibelius doesn’t even go to the trouble of changing their names!): Faulkner’s Sartorius and the Snopes (in “Reichkreditkassen”); Walt Disney’s Bambi, and Gore Vidal’s John Cave and Myra Breckenridge (in “Seizure of Gold and Foreign Assets”); Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler along with Gertrude Stein’s Herslands and Dehnings (in “Occupation Costs and other Levies”), which led a caustic critic to wonder whether Sibelius was the only American who had read The Making of Americans; various characters from John Dos Passos, Capote’s Holly Golightly, and Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, Charles Bruno and Guy Daniel Haines (in “Clearing Agreements”); Hammet’s Sam Spade and Vonnegut’s Eliot Rosewater, Howard Campbell and Bokonon (in “Manipulation of Exchange Rates”); and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Amory Blaine, Gatsby and Monroe Starr, along with poems by Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, and the abstract, oblique, shadowy characters they imply (in “German Control over American Banking”).