First published in 2013 by And Other Stories
www.andotherstories.org
London – New York
Copyright © Iosi Havilio 2012
English language translation copyright © Beth Fowler 2013
Introduction copyright © Alex Clark 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.
The right of Iosi Havilio to be identified as Author of Paradises (original title Paraísos) has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is published within the framework of the “Sur” Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship of the Argentine Republic.
Obra editada en el marco del Programa “Sur” de Apoyo a las Traducciones del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto de la República Argentina.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 9781908276247
eBook ISBN 9781908276254
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Contents
- Introduction by Alex Clark
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
This one belongs to Mirko, Loli and Zlé
Introduction
‘I dream of toads, skirts, orgies and horses,’ recorded the unnamed narrator of Iosi Havilio’s first novel, Open Door, whose story is reprised in Paradises. Then, the wildness and surrealism of her sleepscape represented the complications that were multiplying in her waking life: having quit the city following the disappearance of her lover, Aída, she had come to rest in a small countryside town that was also home to a lunatic asylum, formed a fragile relationship with a taciturn farmer, begun a strange, unpredictable liaison with a young local girl and become pregnant. These seismic events suggest a certain self-determination, or even agency, but almost the reverse is the case: our protagonist appeared to drift in and out of places, attachments, states of mind, occasionally allowing herself to be directed by sexual desire or an appetite for experiment, but largely content – or at least prepared – to let events unfold without her intervention.
Havilio uses a correspondingly blank, affectless prose style to describe his creation’s progress, or lack of it, although it is also studded with fragments of imagery and curious juxtapositions, as with the toads and orgies above. Its power is undeniable: we are gradually and stealthily drawn into this peculiar, disturbing story, intrigued by the narrator’s inner and outer lives and wrong-footed by the parallels between the disjointed community she has found by chance and the wider world of the patients at Open Door who, as its name suggests, are free to come and go as they please. The novel’s close – the apparent arrival of a UFO – is both determinedly odd and unusually cheerful: ‘I feel happy’ are its final words.
At the beginning of Paradises, it emerges that life has cohered, only to fall apart again. A few years have passed, and the narrator has built a relatively stable life with the farmer, Jaime, and their son, Simón. But Jaime is killed in a hit-and-run accident, and things begin to unravel; evicted from their farm, burdened with too many possessions to carry comfortably but too few to make a home, the narrator and Simón make their way to Buenos Aires. They have little money and fewer plans. Survival is, clearly, their first priority.
The landscape is demonstrably different – flooded streets through which pedestrians guide themselves by a rope, crowded bars and cheap hotels with communal kitchens – but it would be simplistic to see Paradises as the city sequel to Open Door’s rural beginnings. Both are about contingency, and about the connections between people, but they are also about boundaries: between stability and disintegration, the real and the imaginary, the sane and the insane. They probe the extent to which autonomy and independence are illusions. Despite its urban setting, which could conjure vastness and anonymity, Paradises is notable for its enclosures: el Buti, the squat in which the narrator and her son go to live, named for a young man who died resisting eviction; the zoo, and more specifically the reptile house, in which she goes to work; and the underground shelter in a palatial house.
This last is part of the family home of Axel, a quasi-boyfriend of Eloísa, the sexually uninhibited young woman from Open Door, who makes a characteristically dramatic reappearance in Buenos Aires. Once again the narrator is caught between resisting her attractions and being unable to, although she seems to have gained some perspective, remarking astutely that Eloísa is ‘exhausted from always having to be the same. So theatrical. And yet again, as in the past, as with her adventures in the country, my attention is grabbed by that capacity of hers to re-emerge as though nothing has happened, burying everything, without blame or remorse, like an animal.’
Eloísa’s oddness is not unrivalled, though: the reader is also presented with Tosca, a monstrous and mysterious woman who presides over el Buti and whom the narrator injects daily with morphine; with Canetti, the zoo’s janitor, whose former life as a bank treasurer collapsed when he attempted to deceive his employers; and with Iris, a secretive Transylvanian woman stranded in Argentina after her boyfriend’s departure. These are lives in the process of some kind of complicated collapse, or stalled and circumscribed – and they are the people to whom the narrator, once again despite any outward sign of volition, is drawn.
This, then, is hardly a paradise, and indeed the novel’s title doesn’t refer to an ideal or heavenly place, but rather to the paradise trees that fill the city and strew it with their ‘poison beads’, toxic little fruits that come in through the windows and for which the antidote is the bark of the same plant. ‘The antidote alongside the poison, that sounds reasonable,’ reflects the narrator, although it is also a problematic and confusing state of affairs, that the source of harm and its cure be found in such close proximity.
Those tensions and uncertainties are at the heart of Paradises, which sets the fugue-like state of its narrator against a phantasmagorical backdrop, one seething with snakes and monsters and terrors. Once again, Havilio asks us to suspend judgement on what is materially real and what is a projection of some variety of inner turmoil or distress; to consider whether desire can ever be straightforwardly itself or whether it is always the displacement of another, less approachable appetite; to ponder on what, ultimately, constitutes freedom. These existential questions, impossible to answer, find their unsettling expression in Havilio’s shifting, undefinable exploration of alienation and its surprising consequences.
Alex Clark
London, March 2013