AUTHOR: Martín Caparrós
PUBLISHER: Penguin Random House
GENRE: Journalistic chronicle and fiction
READER’S NAME: Alejandro Varderi
DATE: June 6, 2020
Reading this book in the midst of the Covit-19 pandemic, brings an absorbing layer to a story full of implications about life and death, which unfolds half a century from now when eternal life seems to be more than a dream. However, the story begins in a small Patagonian town where life still flows as we know it. The Chinese word?tsian —“paraíso” [paradise]— gives us the clue to decipher such sought after possibility that, somehow, is not appealing to many people from the town. “Yo lo que quiero es comer” p. 17 [What I want is to eat] answers a woman confronted with such possibility.
From here, this 488 pages work will reflect upon a myriad of pressing subjects in contemporary society: equality vs. inequality, privileged vs. disadvantaged, fortunate vs. unfortunate, educated vs. uneducated; on a background where religious wars, massive displacements, globalization and the digital revolution deepen the gap between the haves and the haves nots.
In this way, “Viajar como antes,” p. 21 [to travel like before] although “nadie sabe bien cuándo era ‘antes’” [nobody knows well when was ‘before’] has a bitter eco in this uncertain present, where normal life has become another utopia, and the plague of that distant future —the disintegration of the human body and its supplanting by a cyber one— echoes the mutability of life as we have known it until now.
The large range of characters, where Samar, a being sexually fluid, makes possible eternal life, opens up new venues for the author’s critical thoughts on the destiny of the human race, and for his nostalgic look towards life the way it was before, when “repetition” of what one had already lived was not a curse: “Repetición, repetición, repetición. La Eternidad que les vendemos es un momento que no se cierra nunca, un momento que lo ocupa todo, águila picoteando,” p. 226. [Repetition, repetition, repetition. The Eternity we sell to them is a moment that never ends, a moment that inhabits everything, an eagle pecking].
From Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here (1935) to M.T. Anderson’s Feed (2002) and Vishrut Abhinna’s The Future Society. A Journey to the Unknown (2018), among many other works, the writer’s fascination with the unforeseeable future has been widely explored and exploited. However, the time that will come, foretold in Sinfín, brings a poetic and subtle approach to situations where violence strikes a chord and demands an emotional response from the reader: “Pero la mayoría de la población que quedaba en Europa no pertenecía a ninguno de los bandos; salvo cuando la violencia directa aparecía en sus lugares, la Guerra de Dioses les resultaba ajena,” p. 363 [However, the majority of the remaining population in Europe did not belong to either site; except when direct violence appeared in their places, the Gods’ War was alien to them].
In Sinfín English speaking audiences will find themselves in an intriguing and, at the same time, familiar turf, since the unpredictability of the American government, the rising of intolerance among citizens, and the continuous intimidation of those who hold power, threaten the present and cast a dark shadow over the country’s future.
Martín Caparrós is a well-known Argentinean author who has lived in Europe and the United States. He has written extensively about the themes developed in Sinfín —his latest book recently published in Spain— in other works of fiction and nonfiction, and in his films Cazadores de utopias (1996) and Crónicas méxicas (2003). Sinfín will initiate the publication of Caparrós’ complete oeuvres, which include widely read books such as El hambre, La voluntad, Valfierno and Lacrónica; several of them will be reissued in revised and updated Spanish editions.
