Life in the Damn Tropics

Marcos Eltaleph finds himself under a kind of house-or hospital-arrest at the start of Life in the Damn Tropics, restricted to his bed. In fact, the book begins and ends in bed, romps around the boudoir pretty frequently, draws a good number of ideas and plans from bed, but it's not a dream-world book. No, there's no magically shifting line here between levels of reality. What happens to and around Marcos Eltaleph is this-world-real, violent, irrational and passionate. Life in the Damn Tropics is a great read, spare and funny, sympathetic and justly satiric toward its struggling, naïve hero. Any novel that begins with a character who wakes up reminds me of Kafka's story, but unlike Gregor Samsa, Marcos Eltaleph wakes up to find that not he but the world around him, Guatemala City of the early 1980s, has become nearly unrecognizable. Granted, Eltaleph has been living on a sinecure, cared for by his entrepreneurial brothers, and he reaches his mid-50s happily unaware of what it really takes to make a living. But he suffers mightily for his inattention-hemorrhoids (a reminder of what he thinks of himself?) are not the least of it-and the suffering does help him to refine his vision of his family, himself, and the culture in which he is truly a resident alien. Specifically, two things cause Marcos distress. First, his brothers. They have provided for him and insured his naiveté, and they have made him their sap. Neither Aaron, with his prominent place in the Jewish community, nor David, president of the family business, has time to waste under house arrest, so Marcos is offered up, along with a significant bribe, as part of the incidental cost of doing business in Guatemala. No malice, just business. Second source of grief is Guatemala itself, and this, I think, is one of the novel's savviest inventions. Guatemala of tropical lowlands and high cloud forests is almost absent, but the jungle is present in every one the unanticipated cruelties, again, none personal. It's all business (even the politics) in the decayed, militaristic society, the deaths, the disappearances, the bombings, all as impersonal as being mauled by a jaguar or strangled by a creeper vine in the dense forest. But Marcos is not so innocent that he fails to examine himself. He gets the message. Forced to begin managing his own affairs when the family business can no longer support him, he opens a nightclub. When he finds out that a bunch of generals and idealistic boys and a couple of business brains are using his place to plan another overthrow of the government, Marcos reckons his own semi-conscious role in the eruption of one of Guatemala's social volcanoes, and he takes action...at great cost. He moves with the purpose of a young man on a character-building quest, only this time it's a "bald, bare-butted fifty-three-year-old newborn," as Eltaleph describes himself, who does the growing. That irony alone makes Damn Tropics a really satisfying read.

Jewish diaspora narratives lend themselves quite readily to absurdism. Life is comprised of a concatenation of illogical events, sequential by chronology, but nothing else. The search for truth is subverted by the constant reminder that there is no truth, and that any of the tenets of essence that one might have employed to assure oneself of a bit of certainty in the world are utterly hollow.Language is layered and mediated, worlds are polyphonous and dialogical, but there is no actual response, since several languages are employed simultaneously. Causality is in effect, but it is primitive, and meaningless, except in the construction of metaphor. Example: the consumption of raw turtle eggs lead to immediate, severe, violent food poisoning. However, this is also an echo of the existential response to nostalgia; the memories (submerged, sad, sweet) of the last time one ate turtle eggs.Marcos Eltaleph, the protagonist, is hostage to the misdeeds of his brother, Aaron Eltaleph, who is under hospital arrest in Guatemala City, where he is suspected of double-dealing by Guatemalan officials. Marcos, forced into a position of loyalty that threatens to undermine the only way(s) he knows himself, begins to implode psychologically as the family scandal expands.The energy of implosion is picaresque, and there is a sort of joy in the destruction of preconceived notions. Adrenaline is preferable to logical response. The things that have value are made valueless, including life, work, human invention. Aaron's venture into the nightclub business is a perfect example of this. It begins as a venture filled with promise, then turns into a gathering place for the Guatemalan military and heavy-hitters -- always dangerous in Central America. Much of the narrative rests on the deliberate countering of family values and Jewish tradition. Marcos rebels, or perversely disregards, the core values of his family by having a Colombian prostitute as a girlfriend, by making deals with untrustworthy, highly venal partners, the Guatemalan dictatorship / mob.Yet, there is a celebration of the eccentric, wily, and street-smart. The breakdown of rigid societal structures allows others to emerge with dionysian energy. Metamorphosis is possible.The setting of Life in the Damn Tropics heightens contrasts between luxury "compound" vacations and the jungle around it. Jungle, dnager, invasion of body and self are ever-present metaphors for life in an absurd situation caught between competing interests.Nevertheless, Guatemala, which is perhaps the quintessential dystopia -- an infernal inversion of Eden -- provides an anarchic, playful catalyst to life.