El Americano
Jeffrey Lawrence
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"The scorn of our formidable neighbor who does not know us is our America's greatest danger" —José Martí, Nuestra América It is a bildungsroman, a treatise against monolingualism, and a comedy of hemispheric misunderstandings. Laughter, in El Americano, signals both the political conflict of irreconcilable positions, and the possibility of solidarities that transcend the limits of identity. The main character is a “weird gringo” who devours Latin American literature with a singular obsession. Other gringos come to Latin America to have a good time, to have experiences, to sightsee. He comes to read everything he can find. And for decades, he’s read everything, from those most difficult canons of Mexico and Argentina, to the most obscure cult writers—out of print, untranslatable—from Puerto Rico or Uruguay. Which is to say, over the years, his obsession with Latin American literature (which far exceeds the definition of either a hobby or a profession) becomes the driving force of this American’s life. Voracious reading (in another language, in other worldviews) becomes a pure experience that shapes a strange subjectivity, a rich and problematic way of inhabiting the world. Why? Why does this white gringo dedicates his life to the language of our America? Why does he read everything—even the stuff no one else reads? Why does he write his first novel in such perfect Spanish? At a time when Latin American writers seeking awards and recognition abandon their native language to write in English, this American writer does the opposite—he writes and publishes in Spanish, with independent publishers, the last bastion of publishing that has not been assimilated into multinational corporations. In English, the novel would be a hit; in Spanish, it will only be read by the most determined readers among us—cruel or generous—and we are not many. Rather than admiration for the bravery or naivety of the feat, this arouses suspicion in the reader. That suspicion, so Latin American, of course, is at the center of the story.
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“When they asked me the question in Montevideo, why did you come to Uruguay?, there was almost always another more imposing and disturbing question beneath it: why did you learn Spanish? I can’t stop asking myself that question, and I can’t stop thinking that people are asking it of me, even when they don’t say it out loud. What are you doing here, speaking to us in our language? What do you really want? Don’t you understand that the game is being played at your house, on your court, which is the biggest court in the world?” (133, translated from the Spanish by Kasey Peters)
The protagonist of the novel, however, is language. But as we well know, language is both “the companion the Empire” and the house of friendship. How then, to reconcile in a single life, Empire and friendship, power and solidarity, or even more difficult, capital and love? This is how the first page of El Americano begins:
A few years ago a Mexican friend told me: with Portuguese you get to the truth through exaggeration. And after warming up with two portentous nasal noises, he taught me how to be Brazilian, reciting a series of poems in an impeccable Carioca accent, or rather what I perceived as a Carioca accent, because my capacity to decipher Lusophone dialects isn’t what it should be given my academic credentials. My ear for Spanish, on the other hand, is very good. I can differentiate between Puerto Rican Spanish, Cuban Spanish, and Dominican Spanish; I notice the slight distinction between the accent of Mexico City and the more sing-song tones of people from the NorthSometimes, I have even been able to identify a Montevidean among a crowd of porteños, to the great pleasure of the Uruguayan and the greater annoyance of the Argentinians, who swear to me that the orientales speak exactly as they do… just a little slower. But I have never been able to fully replicate, like my friend, other people’s sounds, and after many years I have had to settle for a hodgepodge Spanish, a Univisión Spanish filled with gringo intonations that burst in every time I get nervous. A Spanish that comes together only when I find myself, like now, in the Hispanic world.” (p. 13-14, translated from the Spanish by Kasey Peters)
El Americano is an explosion of perspectives: how Latin Americans see the gringo, how the gringo sees his empire and himself from the eyes of Latin Americans, how the gringo sees a vast, enormous continent which appears, from a distance, to be one thing, and from close-up, an explosion. The misunderstandings are intense and shocking in the novel: literary, romantic, racial, geopolitical, sports-related, sexual. The first chapter begins during a year of residence in Guanajuato, during what gringos call the gap year (after high school, before college) in which the protagonist barely speaks Spanish and makes all the romantic mistakes of a white gringo lost in Mexico. The second chapter takes place in Río de la Plata. The protagonist goes to study at the University of Buenos Aires where he experiences a massive university strike (something that does not happen in oh-so obedient Gringolandia) and ends up completing the academic year in Montevideo. The last chapter takes place in New York, with sporadic stays in Latin America; the protagonist is an adult professor, who now proposes to write a novel in Spanish in a country where that language is in itself a subversive act. As we know, acquiring fluency in another language and culture is a long process. El Americano seems to want to tell us that it also has to be hard and shocking, and that it makes us humble, because we lose all sophistication at the beginning, because we make ourselves ridiculous, because living daily (not to mention loving) in another language and culture make us simultaneously more sensitive and more clumsy, more aware and more naive. But of course, we laugh when reading this last sentence, all of us Latin Americans who have had to come to the United States or Europe to work, forced by the economic situations of our countries. We laugh because living in another language and culture seems in this novel to be a decision (it is not, but it seems like it), and more than that, a passion—not a material necessity. The staging of this “laughter” is central to the novel, which is very aware of it, which also laughs at the Americano along with the readers, which laughs at itself while still taking itself tremendously seriously. That is to say, at the same time that the novel makes fun of itself, it also takes seriously the courage of the Americano to want to stop being American. Between self-mockery and abandonment, the novel seeks to accept “the uncomfortable paradox of my position” (135, translated from the Spanish by Kasey Peters).
There’s a particularly comic scene (in a novel that I have already described above as a comedy of hemispheric misunderstandings) that illustrates this way of making fun of oneself and at the same time taking life seriously. I think it’s a scene that illustrates both the relationship between literature and Empire, as well as the uncontrollable desire to get away from ourselves, that becoming-minoritarian that Deleuze (or Néstor Perlongher) spoke of not as an essence but as a movement. The protagonist finds many years later a notebook that he had during his first year in Montevideo, when he was a young man who did not know what to do with his life, in a particularly depressing moment (broken hearted and living in another country). In the notebook, he finds a poem from that time, which the novel reproduces. It’s a corny poem, the kind of thing all of us have written who fell madly in love with literature when we were young. The young American writes that when gringo adults ask what he wants to be, he will answer that he wants to be a cursed Latin American poet (this is a summary of several verses). And while he defines that desire in about five or six verses, he also says that it will be “a kind of cheap Conrad, but the other way around” (110, translated from the Spanish by Kasey Peters). The laughter is found, of course, in the impossibility of abandoning ourselves to the experience. It’s an impossibility that in the literary tradition of the English language usually manifests not in a comic way but in a heroic and hypermasculine way (not to mention in a sexist and racist way), a desire to conquer. We see it as much in Conrad as in Hemingway (a constant counterpoint in this novel) or in Kerouac. Jeff Lawrence’s novel is, clearly, a devastating mockery of that Anglo-imperialist literary tradition in which the adventurous white writer goes to get drunk in Latin America or Africa without making the slightest effort to read a single author from the country he visits, or to learn anything of the language (we can add here Hunter S. Thompson in Puerto Rico, or William Burroughs in Morocco).
There’s a particularly comic scene (in a novel that I have already described above as a comedy of hemispheric misunderstandings) that illustrates this way of making fun of oneself and at the same time taking life seriously. I think it’s a scene that illustrates both the relationship between literature and Empire, as well as the uncontrollable desire to get away from ourselves, that becoming-minoritarian that Deleuze (or Néstor Perlongher) spoke of not as an essence but as a movement. The protagonist finds many years later a notebook that he had during his first year in Montevideo, when he was a young man who did not know what to do with his life, in a particularly depressing moment (broken hearted and living in another country). In the notebook, he finds a poem from that time, which the novel reproduces. It’s a corny poem, the kind of thing all of us have written who fell madly in love with literature when we were young. The young American writes that when gringo adults ask what he wants to be, he will answer that he wants to be a cursed Latin American poet (this is a summary of several verses). And while he defines that desire in about five or six verses, he also says that it will be “a kind of cheap Conrad, but the other way around” (110, translated from the Spanish by Kasey Peters). The laughter is found, of course, in the impossibility of abandoning ourselves to the experience. It’s an impossibility that in the literary tradition of the English language usually manifests not in a comic way but in a heroic and hypermasculine way (not to mention in a sexist and racist way), a desire to conquer. We see it as much in Conrad as in Hemingway (a constant counterpoint in this novel) or in Kerouac. Jeff Lawrence’s novel is, clearly, a devastating mockery of that Anglo-imperialist literary tradition in which the adventurous white writer goes to get drunk in Latin America or Africa without making the slightest effort to read a single author from the country he visits, or to learn anything of the language (we can add here Hunter S. Thompson in Puerto Rico, or William Burroughs in Morocco).
“I admit that it bothers me that there are almost no personal histories written in Spanish by an English speaker. After nearly ten thousand gringo novels that take place in a Latin America where the protagonist doesn’t even know how to order a fucking mezcal in the local language (and nearly ten thousand novels written by Spanish speakers who switch to English to ‘reach a bigger market’, it’s time for a gringo to go against the linguistic tide. . Let me put it this way. I don’t want to be like those New York tourists who pride themselves on stringing together two sentences in a row to speak to an Andean waiter and then take refuge in their universal English to explain that everything sucks or that we suck or that you all are having the life sucked out of you. If studying a second language for so long has helped me do anything, it is to talk to you directly, without the duplicitous crutch of translation. I consider it my duty.
Please stop going to the nearest bookstore to browse the latest from the United States. Don’t buy any more books by the Beats or the Lost Generation translated into Spanish, much less those same books in their original language. Not for social, political, or economic reasons, but simply because it’s all been done. Does one have to get drunk with two prostitutes at the most worn-out racetracks in California to be an American? Does one have to take an ayahuasca trip in the Amazon to be considered a true gringo traveler? Do you realize that in the United States, people make fun of Bukowski? That they think of him like one of those patients in the Viagra ads whose penis doesn’t go down in four hours, afflicted because he tried to take in North American society at one gulp, not because he fought against it? Allow me to make my pitch. This book, unlike the others, is untranslatable. And please don’t think I’m being Whitmanesque. What I mean is that this book will never appear in English. It will stay between us. I don’t want to risk my position in the Anglophone world, and I don’t want you to associate me with that tradition of ‘risk takers’ ” (15-16, translated from the Spanish by Kasey Peters).
Against this tradition, Lawrence uses two alternative traditions. On the one hand, he invokes the (American-)Jewish humor tradition of self-deprecation. He mocks his own tragic desire, his own search for meaning, that existential boredom that is the disease of straight white men. The Jewish heritage of the protagonist, also common in the Río de la Plata, is the reason for some key moments in the novel. On the other hand, Lawrence pulls from the novels of Roberto Bolaño (a recurring figure in the novel) or Ricardo Piglia, in which courage and experience are found not in the desire for conquest but in the obsessive reading of others’ literature. But what Lawrence does here is more than a simple mockery or ridicule of that literary tradition.
Behind the laughter in this novel, there is a powerful faith in reading. And that faith is so powerful that it deserves the following questions (if not their answers): Can reading emancipate us from loneliness? Can literature create solidarities against imperial and genocidal monolingualism? Or, perhaps in a funnier way, alluding to Martí, can literature latin-americanize the gringos so that they no longer disdain us? El Americano is a brilliant and inspiring literary debut, uncomfortable and brave. The end of the novel promises to be the beginning of a long, and well, “risky”, body of work. Here, in this other world, where poetic glory is passed without pain, without glory, without world, without a miserable mortadella sandwich.
(This review was translated by Kasey Peters.)
Behind the laughter in this novel, there is a powerful faith in reading. And that faith is so powerful that it deserves the following questions (if not their answers): Can reading emancipate us from loneliness? Can literature create solidarities against imperial and genocidal monolingualism? Or, perhaps in a funnier way, alluding to Martí, can literature latin-americanize the gringos so that they no longer disdain us? El Americano is a brilliant and inspiring literary debut, uncomfortable and brave. The end of the novel promises to be the beginning of a long, and well, “risky”, body of work. Here, in this other world, where poetic glory is passed without pain, without glory, without world, without a miserable mortadella sandwich.
(This review was translated by Kasey Peters.)
Jeffrey Lawrence (Salt Lake City, 1983) is a writer, translator, and university professor. He holds a PhD in comparative literature from Princeton University and is currently an associate professor at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He is the author of the book Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño (Oxford, 2018) and the translator into English of the works Últimas noticias de la escritura by Sergio Chejfec (Charco, 2023) and Cómo viajar sin ver: Latinoamérica en tránsito by Andrés Neuman (Restless, 2017). He is part of the founding team of Grupo de Estudios Sobre Editoriales Independientes (GESEI) and is one of the creators of the online magazine El Roommate: Colectivo de Lectores.
El americano is a publication by Chatos Inhumanos.
El americano is a publication by Chatos Inhumanos.
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