Federico Jeanmaire: class struggle on a ledge

There are authors whose prolific condition is always underlined;

In Argentine literature, César Aira takes first place in reviews where this inclination to graphomania is mentioned, although in number of pages per year there are others, such as Martín Caparrós and even Daniel Guebel, who may take a few heads off.

Then there are authors who did not publish as much but over time they built a bibliography that already exceeds twenty titles;

Martín Kohan, for example, is in that group, and also

, who summons us here.

Jeanmaire's new novel is

, and here is its plot.

It is the story of a group of young people from a town in Buenos Aires who gather around Yesi –a hellish red-haired woman who has everyone a little hypnotized with her beauty but also with her mental speed– to carry out a plan that only she he knows, and that he will reveal little by little and with suspense.

Supposedly, the plan would consist of changing the world for the better, to use the abstract and somewhat general terms with which she conveys it to him.

But we know, the readers (they, the seven "Poles" of the group, don't know it), that Yesi is carrying a pending revenge, which is at the origin of his identity, and that perhaps the plan has to do with that personal repair .

Complete the picture of the novel Borges, a clairvoyant newsstand who, when one of the boys passes by, solves for them what is going to happen with some vaguely hermetic phrase that they will have to decode.

That is the set of facts that punctuate the plot, and as is already inferred in this very brief summary,

combines and remixes various genres and tones: police, social realism -the question of classes is central in the text–, a touch of delirium, streaks of metafiction.

It is a novel that could be labeled as experimental if we did not associate the experimental with something a little less entertaining or fast and if labeling were not a practice that should be avoided.

In this sense, The Band of Poles is a risky novel in which Jeanmaire balances on the ledge of plausibility.

The same goes for certain Aira novels (not all).

How far do we accompany the narrator in his twists, in his unexpected twists?

Here there is a ease in the tone that is what makes it possible to say everything, to mix, to test the limits of realism.

That ease is verified in the dialogues but especially in the sexual scenes, which are few but very well carried out.

It is not easy to narrate sexual scenes.

In fact, it is very difficult.

There are authors who do it very well but above all there are authors who do it very badly;

the majority prefer, judiciously, to avoid the inconvenience and eliminate those scenes as if they were in a movie suitable for all audiences.

(In England there is the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, an award for the worst sex scene in a novel published each year. The "anti-award" has been given for thirty years and is almost always won by male writers.)

In

, one of the boys falls in love with the village priest and they have sex a couple of times throughout the plot.

What could be a dense topic –and deep down it is–, such as pedophilia in the church, is resolved here without line drops or opinions from the narrator; there is a light tone that hovers over all those dense problems that run through the book, a tone that for some will be the success of the book and for others a mark of frivolity.

Lately, revealing major plot twists is discouraged, but let's mention that towards the end of the book it is revealed that Borges, the newsstand, is more than just a mysterious and colorful character who gives Poles oracular phrases.

This is the last movement that Jeanmaire produces and in which, once again, he tenses the plausible so that the reader can accompany him on the adventure.

The gang of Poles

can also be read in the tradition of urban novels.

This means that the city and its settings are not decorations but elements that directly affect the course of events and modify them.

The Poles gather every day in a "sad and bald little square that is right next to one of the exits from the town."

On one side of the square, the Borges kiosk;

on the other, the church.

That the square where much of the plot takes place is right next to the exit is no coincidence: the vast and opulent city is out there, just a few steps away, but they live in that labyrinthine citadel even though the exit is "right" there. the side.

Two or three times throughout the book they leave and go to the Cathedral of Buenos Aires, no less: a historic area and emblem of the old European Buenos Aires, with its lavish buildings and its unrepeatable trees.

Going out and going in is, thus, the sign of this novel: they go out and go in, but also a contingent of well-to-do women will leave (their neighborhood) to enter (the villa), at a central moment of the operation that the Yesi sketched.

For the rest, it is impossible to risk what will be the next literary movement of

.

His two previous novels worked with an autobiographical substratum and crossed it with the investigation of historical facts.

Here it is all unbridled, playful imagination.

Just as there are writers who seem to always write the same book, others seem to write something different each time.

The gang of Poles

, Frederic Jeanmaire.

Anagram, 188 pages.

$4,650

Interview: white and dark Argentines

What is the genesis of this novel?

–It began by chance, as almost all my novels begin.

Luis Mey picked me up at my house to go eat a barbecue and I don't know why we started talking about the Pole, the cumbia singer.

Then Luis told me that in the village – he lived very close to a village, in the north of the Conurbano – all the blonds, the white ones, they call them Poles.

The next day I started writing the novel with that, without really knowing what I wanted to do.

An idea that I have, I think since I can remember, about the racial problem in Argentina, that everyone hides or hides, and that is immersed in everything political, is that the darkest have the least paid jobs, those that whites do not they want to do.

And another thing that I always found very striking about Argentina is that the leaders who have defended the dark have always been very white.

The case of Rosas is emblematic, but there are several to make a list.

With those two things I went off to the novel.

–Sometimes you write more “serious” or denser novels (for example, your two previous ones,

and

) and others that are crazier or with more humorous tones.

Does the theme set the tone?

–I only write about what I am passionate about writing at any given time.

In this sense, what I try is to find the appropriate form for what I want to write.

And so the forms of my novels are quite changeable –luckily for me, because I don't get bored of writing.

This novel,

, is related to others of mine: with Lighter Than Air, with

, with

, with one of my first, Untying almost the knots and I guess some others.

They are my most political novels, more interested in the social, and all of them are written in a register that we could call, with some pain on my part, "humorous", because I think that is the way to tell these things or it is the way that I have to get into these things and cause, with a bit of luck, that the reader, after he laughed during the reading, at some point in the novel or after finishing it, wonders why he laughed at what he laughed at .

I think that speaks of my Renaissance or even my literary pre-Renaissance.

There are, then, decisions that I am making on the fly because they seem appropriate to me.

In this case the boys do not speak like boys from the village;

They don't talk like Puan kids either, but they talk like they're middle class,

and the only one who puts words that could be in a villero dictionary or in a dictionary of popular neighborhoods, to say it euphemistically as we like, is the character Borges.

I really like creating artificial languages ​​and this is one of those cases.

You wrote a good number of books.

What do you find most pleasurable and what is most difficult to write?

It's true, I wrote many novels.

This is my 25th book, my 23rd published novel and I wrote a lot, perhaps too much, one can say.

What is the most difficult for me?

I don't have much trouble writing.

It is what I like the most in life and for me it is very pleasant.

I have a great time writing.

I think it's what I enjoy the most, apart from a couple of everyday things.

What I realize is that if they make me choose, I prefer these kinds of novels, a little removed from me, to those like

or

or

or

, in which there is a part of me.

In the long run it costs me more to think about them;

Not when I wrote them, because I enjoyed writing them, but I think it's harder for me to recognize them today as mine, even if it's paradoxical.

At the Book Fair

.

Presentation of “The band of the Poles”, with the participation of Hinde Pomeraniec and Silvia Hopenhayn.

Sunday May 7, 5:30 p.m.

DF Sarmiento Room.

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"Wërra", by Federico Jeanmaire: understanding a war, an impossible mission

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Federico Jeanmaire, to find out who the victim is