Old Wine in a New Bottle

Old Wine in a New Bottle: La novela perdida de Borges by Pablo Paniagua

. . . In a 21^st century version of many a Guanajuato legend, the student intruders use a neighboring roof to get into the house where the treasure lies. . .

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I’ve just finished Pablo Paniagua’s short novel, La novela perdida de Borges, set partly in Guanajuato, Pablo’s home now for more than a dozen years.  The book, was published in an admirable edition by Indie Press, Leon, Mexico, with a new edition published in Spain now available through Amazon. Easy Spanish but you can be on the lookout for it in an English translation in a couple of years.

I was already a Paniagua fan after reading ExEx, a surrealist melodrama about a young Spanish woman with a mustache modeling in New York. In his debut novel, Paniagua concocted an intoxicating brew of fantasy, feminine daring, humor, erotic moments and violence, in those proportions. I found his clear, literate style a pleasure.

The new novel has similar ingredients, but a different savor. In this one, a randy young Spaniard wants to bed a beautiful upper-class Mexican student who accompanies him to hear a famous lecturer trash Jorge Luis Borges, the famed Argentine writer. The  strength of the young man’s erotic urge compels him to fly across the ocean with his bitchy paramour to, you guessed it, Guanajuato, where she is hell-bent on recovering an unfinished Borges manuscript while he pursues his private goal.

                                                                       

Paniagua describes both Guanajuato’s squalor and its beauty (“… a world with transparent, shining atmosphere, without gradations between sun and shade, like the ying and yang . . .) through the eyes of the first time visitors to the city. Later, in a 21^st century version of many a Guanajuato legend, these student intruders use a neighboring roof to get into the house where their treasure lies. By that time, they have already shopped for needed tools for the burglary, sampled the local nightlife, stalked their prey--a violinist on a callejon renamed Gatos Muertos--and attended a symphony concert.

The writer has a flair for combining sexual fantasy with explicit physical details, but his book is more than entertainment. It is a collage of plot twists, place descriptions, mini-essays, bifurcations, duplicity and a believable/unbelievable portrait of a stage of life many of us have almost forgotten. His unrelenting list of the violence reported on Mexican television struck me as even more forceful than the headlines I pass at a newsstand every day.

The night I finished reading this page-turner, I woke up in the early morning feeling bothered. In fact, maybe the next to the last chapter does shift gears too suddenly. And why weren’t more place names transformed? But before I knew it, I was marveling at the ingenious way the whole book is put together. Instead of writing a farce with the characters playing tricks on each other, Paniagua plays a trick on his readers who don’t need to have read Borges (or Paniagua on fractal literature) to laugh when the rabbit jumps out of the hat.