Winter Quarters: A Novel of Argentina

Soriano's very first novel (which hasn't yet been translated into English) is a parody featuring Philip Marlowe; written sixteen years later, the curious and entertaining "Winter Quarters" is similarly indebted to Raymond Chandler's fiction. It is also a dysfunctional-buddy novel, with a story arc reminiscent of "Of Mice and Men," featuring the has-been singer Andres Galvan in the intelligent, cynical George Milton role and the down-and-out boxer Rocha as the trusting, dim-witted Lennie character. And, on top of these elements, Soriano adds a political satire of Argentina's bungling, iron-fisted military rulers. It's a potent mix, and the opening chapters are both funny and quick-paced, following the plight of two losers who don't initially realize that they have been booked not to showcase their talents but to make the local authorities look good. Rocha just wants to have fun and win his fight; George just hopes to get paid and leave without making any waves; and the soldiers on every corner want to intimidate the unseen agitators painting anti-government slogans around town. The trouble starts when George, as a point of personal pride, refuses to sign his autograph for a two-bit police chief and when Rocha falls for the mayor's daughter. The novel follows the darkly comic adventures of our unlikely heroes from brothels to bedrooms, from the boxing ring to a hospital room. Even after the potentially lethal stakes of staying in town become clear, George ends up sticking around, unable to abandon his eternally unsuspecting and confident friend to the ignominy of a prizefight that has been fixed by the military. Soriano spins his tale in stinging, skeletal pulp-fiction prose, and the ending, while a bit predictable, is nonetheless touching and pointed.

What goes through your mind when you watch a violent gangster movie? I mean the most violent, blood-spattered, whack-crazy film out there... Do you tingle with terror or do you thrill with vicarious bloodlust, or do you just smirk in the safety of your knowledge that it's only Hollywood, wildly exaggerated for your entertainment? But the most sadistic mayhem and goriest slaughter you've ever seen on the silver screen was an everyday reality, a horror so mundane and common that people grew numb to it, under the capitalist murderocracies in Chile under Pinochet and in Argentina under military rule, with US backing, in the 1970s. Perhaps the current news about drug-cartel violence in Mexico will make that assertion more credible. Fascism in Argentina was a Libertarian's paradise... for those with liberty to torture and kill. Those are not my opinions, of course, but rather the impressions one gets from the writings of Osvaldo Soriano. If I have any opinions, I'll valiantly keep them to myself. "Winter Quarters" is the sequel to the novella "A Funny Dirty Little War", which I've reviewed previously, but you needn't have read the first book in order to handle the second. FDLW depicts a rivalry between two factions of Peronists that explodes out of control, in the scruffy small town of Colonia Vela, eight hours by train from Buenos Aires. "Winter Quarters" returns to the same town some ten years later, when 'everyone' has discretely forgotten the butchery. Now the Army is thoroughly in charge, maintaining "decency" and patriotic pride at the barrel of a machine gun. Two outsiders arrive in town, by invitation from army headquarters, for a festival of gratitude for Freedom and Order. One, the narrator, is a tango singer whose 'popularity' has been restricted by the Military because of his very minor expressions of "protest" years ago. The other is a huge, simple, naive boxer who was once a 'contender' but whose skills have begun to fail; he's been invited with the plain expectation that he'll be thrashed to a pulp by the local hero, who happens to be a Lieutenant in the Army. The two meet on the train platform in Colonia Vela. Nasty things will happen to both in the 190 pages of Winter Quarters before they manage to board the train back to Buenos Aires. Winter Quarters is less graphically violent than FDLW, though plenty action-packed for readers who enjoy adrenalin. It's also insidiously funny, a satire of human depravity at its ugliest that doesn't need to exaggerate. Soriano isn't interested in the existential profundities of his countrymen, Borges and Cortázar, and he's less self-absorbed and/or pretentious than the Chileño Roberto Bolaño. This is a book you'll read in one sitting, even if it makes you miss your hairdresser's appointment.

Soriano writes about the losers in ourselves, yet he does so with the most enlightening glance, a sweet'n' sour prose that keep you awake untill you reach "el fin" ("the end"). There is an ex-boxer-to-be in this novel, a tango singer who is no good enough to sing in the tango capital, cheap hotel rooms and uncomfortable trains. Soriano mixes all these ingredients in a well seasoned recipe which also includes an ironic picture of the Peronist Argentine in the 50's, and serves this delghtful dish on the barren (yet majestic in its solitude) patagonic landscape.