AUTHOR: Alejandra Costamagna
PUBLISHER: Anagrama
GENRE: Fiction / Novel
READER’S NAME: Félix Lizárraga
Alejandra Costamagna (Santiago de Chile, 1970) has published several books, including En voz baja (Sotto Voce, 1996, winner of the Gabriela Mistral Award), Ciudadano en retiro (Retired Citizen, 1998) and Animales domésticos (Domestic Animals, 2011). The present book, El sistema del tacto (The System of Tact, 2018) was a finalist for the prestigious Herralde Award to the Best Novel.
El sistema del tacto began life as an autobiographical book, but later evolved into something different. It is still a very personal book, whose protagonist Ania Coletti shares Costamagna’s initials, and still includes numerous photographs of Costamagna’s Italian-Argentinian grand-aunt who inspired the character of Nélida.
It also includes typing exercises and quotes from a manual for Italian immigrants, and the story is told in two different voices, that of Ania (further divided into present-day Ania and child Ania) and that of her uncle Agustín, Nélida’s son, a recluse who finds refuge in his typewriter and the cheap horror novels brought to him by his only friend, Gariglio. (These novels also appear summarized in brief chapters interspersed throughout the book.)
This fragmentation makes the story somewhat hard to follow in the beginning, but it echoes the fragmented reality of its characters. In the present day, Chilean Ania –who has been let go from her teaching job, has a more or less casual relationship with an older man called Javier, and has been feeling rather rootless for a while now—is tasked by her (also more or less) estranged father with going to see her dying uncle Agustín in the small town of Campana, Argentina, where she used to spend her childhood summers. Agustín dies soon after Ania’s arrival in Campana, and Ania decides to stay for a short while in the joined houses of Agustín and her long-gone grandparents.
That short stay becomes a longer one. Ania starts digging into the past and finds Agustín’s diaries and Nélida’s correspondence, which give her some insight into their personalities, as well as her own. Nélida, who was sent from her Italian town by her family to marry her cousin Aroldo in Argentina; the loner Agustín; and Ania herself, are all rudderless characters who feel loneliness as an inescapable part of themselves, and who, to different degrees, struggle with issues of alienation or mental health, as well as to find purpose in their lives of quiet desperation. For Nélida, madness becomes a haven of sorts, as his typewriter and his penny dreadful books become to Agustín. There is an episode of xenophobia where child Ania ends up in the hospital after being beaten up by Argentinian children in what they see as a patriotic act (though the 1978 war between Chile and Argentina was mostly, ironically, initiated by the latter).
But Costamagna is not interested in the political side of her story. In her own words, her novel “gives visibility to rootlessness, a subject that nowadays has become urgent, universal” (http://culto.latercera.com/2019/02/03/alejandra-costamagna-el-sistema-del-tacto/). Ania’s journey into the past (her own, her family’s) does not find easy answers; it is above all an existential journey, and as such it becomes its own purpose.
El sistema del tacto is an enjoyable novel, though sometimes it becomes almost as lost as its characters, and the fragmentation of her narrative and its slow pace can be a deterrent to some readers. I recommend it.
