Persuasive

Tango For A Torturer. By Daniel Chavarria.
Is it the tropical climate? Is it the tradition of Latin American literature? I don't know. All I know about Cuba is derived from "I Love Lucy," so take that into account when I say that Daniel Chavarria's "Tango for a Torturer" comes across as an authentic slice of life in Cuba as it is lived today —

God, what a terrible, terrible lede. No wonder newspapers are dumping books sections. I can't seem to get a handle on this review. I sound like Leonard Pinth-Garnell. I can't speak knowledgeably about Latin American literature. I've only read Mario Vargas Llosa, Andres Bello and Machado de Assis. That's like describing American literature by reading Michael Chabon, Nathanael Hawthorne and Jonathan Safran Foer.

Perhaps I should take a leaf from Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson and just print my notes

Here goes:

* The plot: Alberto Rios, a military torturer living the retired good life in Cuba is spotted by Aldo Bianchi, one of his former victims, who plots to frame him for a man's death. Helping him is his mistress, Bini, who's incredibly hot but also emotionally unstable.

* From what little I can gather on the Intertubes, Daniel Chavarria's an elderly revolutionary, born in Ecuador, who hijacked a plane to get to revolutionary Cuba, where he's been living ever since. Akashic Books has been coming out with translations of his novels, and this is the third, behind "Adios Muchachos" and "The Eye of Cybele." "Muchachos" won the Best Paperback Original Edgar in 2001.

* It's set in Cuba, but Castro makes as much an appearance as George Bush would in my life. He's background noise. Instead, we're given the native's tour, of people scraping by from day to day, working at their jobs, making a little money on the side, staying out of trouble and taking time to live the good life when they can afford it.

* But there's some political moments. Rios (aka Triple O) is a psychotic who made torturing political prisoners his career. Reading that he perfected his craft at Devil's Horn, Fla., and Fort Paramount, Ga., raises the point that the uses of persuasion (as Rios would put it) wasn't institutionalized by Bush, no matter what Seymour Hersh says.

* The storytelling. Chavarria loves to take little side trips. It reminds me of a Preston Sturges movie ("The Sin of Harold Diddlebock," if you care), in which even the smallest characters had their moment to shine. Here, it's Dr. Azua, the defense attorney, a Cuban combination of Perry Mason and Nero Wolfe, who infallibly determines the guilt or innocence of his clients by laying hands on them. Then there's the homicide detective, Captain Bastidas, called in to investigate the hit-and-run death of a bicyclist in the rain. I can tell you much about his life, but he plays his role early on and doesn't show up again.

* There's disciplined writing here, that works against the models of genre writing. I would expect Michael Connolly to keep the detective in all the way through, working on the case, uncovering Rios' past as a torturer and playing a role in the climax.

The text doesn't behave. It slips into second person at times:
"You hadn't been to a hot climate for several years, since your visit to Maracaibo. And when you breathed the sweet, salty air, you brimmed with adolescent happiness; and in the marrow of your bones, that electric heat of Buenos Aires during carnival."

Sometimes, it's present tense:

Alberto Rios descends through the silent atria. The beckoning fingers of the coral reefs invite him to enter their sumptuous biological mansions, children of the tides nad the centuries. Alberto lights up cauliflower-eared corals with yellow foliage and gigantic green leaves, and swims down toward the nocturnal forest of polyps.

Most of the time, it's straightforward prose, plain but with plenty of local color.

What would a New York editor make of this? Would she read the nine pages devoted to a surprise party for Aldo, or the 11 pages at the end describing another party, this time in prison, and suggest they'd be cut back? There's also plenty of backstory about Rios and his career as a torturer (or as he would tell himself, as an expert in the science of persuasion), about Bini's life, from a little girl to doing time in prison and her work as a mistress. Are all these details really necessary?

I wouldn't cut a word. Maybe they do things different, in another country, and I'd rather play the tourist and learn to dig it, than play imperialist and teach these little brown froggy natives the right way to do it.

Perhaps it's the reader, trained to read books with tight plots, minimal digression, and endings that seem drawn more from genre fiction — the biter biting, the worm turning, the fatal weakness lifting the lever of tragedy — than from the concatenation of events. Whatever. It's a cool book to read.

* I'm not really using my notes. They're more incoherent. But I was having trouble writing this review, and besides, it's so meta! Return to the review.

* Stress it's a Firesign Theatre reference! Return to the review.

* That sounds so smart. Why doesn't the NYTBR return my calls? Return to the review.


Score: 82

Genre: 13 Neither beast nor fowl. This is a story of revenge that's languid at times and doesn't really build to a climax so much as end when it needs to.
Realism: 14 My knowledge of South Americans, and in particular life inside Castro's Cuba is derived solely from watching episodes of "I Love Lucy." But I found convincing Chavarria's detailed insight into his characters and their motivations.
Character: 13 Bini and Alberto Rios stand out as compelling, flawed figures, Despite being the protagonist, Aldo's mission of revenge gives him less scope to reveal his particular sides..
Setting: 15 A native's point of view inside life in Cuba.
Theme: 9 No discernable theme. Despite the political references, this is an apolitical book.
Style: 11 Serviceable, workmanlike prose. It does the job without drawing attention to itself.
Bonus: 7 Chavarria portrays Castro's Cuba as it's lived by the people who work to get by from day to day and who aren't particularly worked up about politics or human rights or even getting to Miami. And just as they may not think much about Castro, they're not thinking much about the United States, either. Except for references to torture (and American sites that have helped train torturers as an instrument of foreign policy), this isn't a political or didactic novel.

What does these numbers mean?
Other links to "Tango For A Torturer"


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