Customer Reviews

La Pista De Hielo (Spanish Edition)

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_La pista de hielo_ is, in my view, easily B's best novel. It is on par with his best short stories. The praise and attention the big novels have garnered are altogether out of proportion to their merit. _Estrella distante_ and _Nocturno de Chile_, B's other short novels, are mighty annoying, and _Amberes_, a somewhat unclassifiable book, is downright unreadable. That leaves some of the short stories and _La pista_, a short and affecting and indeed rather conventional novel that takes place in a small and seemingly tight-knit beach town.

The depiction of the town, as it happens, is one of the attributes of this novel. The reader feels as if he is walking its streets and meeting its people; in _Los detectives salvajes_, by contrast, towns and cities are evoked simply by listing names of streets. The impression is one of reading an index to a city atlas.

The characterization of the novel is also successful. Here, as I recall, there are only three voices, and all of them are, as it were, a joy to listen to. The pennilessness of a couple of the characters is moving (unlike that of the wretches in _Los detectives_, who seem to me to get exactly what they deserve), and they don't talk too much. In the streams of consciousness in B's other short novels, or with the scores of voices in the big novels, there is no room for silence. For me, silences are essential in a novel, and their absence in most of B's work is one of the things I miss most. Let me quote another Latin American writer, who expresses some of what I'm trying to say, though applying the quotation to B's work is perhaps unfair, as B's plainspokenness is hardly oratorical: "Have you read his latest novel?" his friends ask him, referring to a famous writer. "What musicality, what rhythm, what richness of voice! It's a true oratorio!" "Let him sing it," replies Luder.

The mature irony of _La pista_, is another thing that, in my view, makes it B's best novel. The humor of the big novels, by contrast, is mostly juvenile, and in the other shorter novels you'd be hard pressed to find anything funny at all.

Finally, in _La pista_ there's a plot. A plot! Where was it in the other novels? In vain did I search. A plot need not be intricate, or even the primary reason for reading a book, but books that don't intrigue their readers can only be judged failures.

I may not have convinced you that _La pista_ is B's most successful novel, but think what you might have read about the big novels. The NYT, the New Yorker, Harpers, the Atlantic, Slate, and so on--and that's just in the US! Nearly all unanimous in their gushing praise. Nary a dissenting opinion! How right Edward Abbey was to liken literary critics to giant schools of minnows, all turning in the same direction at the same time! Good Lord!