When Ñ asked me to choose three books for 2025, I immediately thought of three very lovely people who left us this year and last year: Daniel Samoilovich, Edgardo Cozarinsky and Beatriz Sarloespecially for his posthumous book do not understand This is the result of unique and inspiring work. Another book that I really enjoyed was Lose your mind from Ariana Harwicz for dismantling the legal world and interpreting it against the grain of passions with the very strained relationship she has with the words: “Love is reparation, revenge. Love is hundreds of aggressive monkeys plundering believers at the door of a Buddhist temple. The law doesn’t understand, the judges don’t understand, or they act as if they have cognitive problems.” But I had the opportunity to read Exemplary smuggling from Pablo Mauretteand as soon as I finished it, I felt like writing.
Exemplary smuggling There is something anachronistic about it, and that paradoxically makes it very current: at the same time untimely and contemporary. At a time when we all feel in a situation dead endIn confusion because we do not know where the announced changes will lead, El Contraband Exemplar presents itself – or threatens to present itself – as a thesis novel about the course of Argentina, as if it wanted to respond to Martínez Estrada with a fiction. And not only that: it takes up the questions of the ancient novelists of the Latin American boom in a surprising way. García Márquez and José Donoso are quoted in the code, and the question from “The Conversation in the Cathedral” by Mario Vargas Llosa (“When did Peru get screwed?”) drives the story forward, even though it refers to our country.
Through two characters – one a Peronist, the other a gorilla – begins a reflection that, as could not be otherwise in the case of Maurette, goes back to the Italian Renaissance and its impact on the Río de la Plata. It is not the only leitmotif that relates to his other texts: some characters, such as Carlos María Pervinapo, come from earlier novels, and the eschatological passion that stands out in his essays also reappears.
The first answer to Vargas Llosa’s question is given by the invention of fictions. But there are not only references to the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries – learned, as the author is used to us – but also rock songs and folkloric stories, Emilio Salgari and the Arabian Nights, Argentine writers (Sarmiento, Borges, Mujica Láinez, Chejfec) and, beyond that, Sebald and Virgilio. There are many ready-made sentences (“The fate of the ugly, the pretty wants it”, “May you be garúe finito”) and other coded sentences, such as “What good air this country has!” by Sancho del Campo. All this knowledge appears as materials that the fictional imagination chops up and reassembles.
The interpretation of Argentine society as anomic in Carlos Nino’s sense – which, according to the novel, begins with the “parainstitutional interlope trade” of the Viceroyalty period (interlope is a colonial term for fraud and illegality) – does not play as big a role as an idea (hence it is not an essay), although sociological hypotheses are embedded here and there: the miniature treatise that opposes ethics and politics; the definition of “autobiography as a branch of pornography”; or the relationships between San Francisco and modernity and the role of narrative in returning to the origins of humanism and then returning to the present: “Without a return journey there is no history.” Maurette continues what I once called peripheral cosmopolitanism, defined in relation to European culture. However, as one reads in The Exemplary Contraband, “novels explain nothing.”
This entire world of texts – which also includes historical research papers – is a quarry from which emerge stories in which theft, plagiarism, plunder and frustration reign. In this way, the novel actually reaches a more radical level: the body’s fear of the monstrous and the need to tell, although, as the narrator confesses, “I’m afraid to put it into words and make it more real.” The birth of the monster, the abnormal and wonderful births of monsters, is the puzzle of one’s imagination, because there are the fundamental questions. Therefore, the novel’s only possible form is that of the monster: a deformed form composed of white-hot remains to defeat boredom and affirm life.
Quevedo wrote that “life begins in tears and feces,” but he also explained that after death “they will be ashes, but it will make sense.” It is inscribed in this monstrous logic, in this smuggling of invented fictions, in this interval between the eschatological and the fantasy Exemplary smuggling.
Exemplary smugglingPablo Maurette. Anagrama Editorial, 344 pages.
About The Author
