On a trip to Bilbao, Spain (a trip in which the priority was to see Marcelo Bielsa's current football team Athletic Bilbao in action) I saw this book and bought it. Since it was the christmas break I thought, fuck it, I'm going to read this as a little divagation from the books set for uni. I was also very keen to read another book in Spanish again, such a rich language I love to peruse.
Having devoured many of the Latin-American classics in the past, I have been very interested in knowing how contemporary fiction from these parts fares... Sure, the critics have practically built a shrine in Roberto Bolano's honour, but - as elsewhere - there are swathes of other writers who do not receive as much attention.
How does this fare, then? Compared with most of the classics, not very well. On its own terms, this is entertaining, original and loopy...
'Esperanto' is an actual language a philologist called Lazarus Ludwig Zamenhof devised, who attempted to produce a composite of all existing languages, thus producing one 'universal' tongue.
And the narrator is christened 'Esperanto'. A former rock star who idolises James Dean and Bob Dylan, he has perished into obscurity for many years and now lives sequestered in a dingy apartment.
And he is the novel's namesake: Ernesto cannot make himself understood to others. Sure, he has no speech impediments and he is articulate, but he lives in a world of rejection and unfortunate mishappenings.
Drifting in and out of sleep, experiencing odd dreams that overlap with the events of the book, his best friend is a giant called Montana Mágica, whose principal interest is the various sounds you can make with farts...
Taking place withing a week, the tone - like the character - is hasty and frenetic. What we mainly see is Esperanto's memories: the past relationships he has had with women, his relationship with his relatives and his debunked career as a rock star.
Once Ernesto gets caught up in a mix-up in a discotheque, the whole thing lets loose and grabs you by the thorat in a cocktail of weirdness... The only shortcoming is the repetetive language; I sometimes found myself re-reading lines, only to find it was the same line, slightly altered and slightly tinkered...
Is there a wealth of great latin-American fiction? Sure. Is this it? I'd say so. Does it beat the hell out of the derivative banal magic realism of the Garcia Marquez variety? Hell yes. Is it going to change the world? No. But it certainly is worth reading...
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