Born in Rosario in 1941, Laiseca has no reason to envy the names listed above—except their fame. Author of a dozen novels, three short story collections, a poetry anthology, and two books of essays, he remains a complete foreigner both abroad and at home. Despite his friendship with César Aira and Fogwill; despite his successful TV programs in Argentina; despite receiving a roster of laudatory obituaries by the likes of Patricio Pron, his books gather dust in the catalogs of small imprints and his public is virtually nonexistent.
This is a terrible loss for readers everywhere. Laiseca ranks among the greatest Latin American writers and his masterpiece Los Sorias stands as the second-best Argentinian novel, according to Piglia, after Los Siete Locos. Yet it is not only this specific work that deserves a bigger audience, but rather his wider and inexhaustible oeuvre whose diversity has few parallels in contemporary literature. From China’s first empire, to the Egypt of the IV Dynasty; from the fantastic geographies of Technocracy, to the detailed realizations of New York’s sewer; from versions of Tang dynasty poetry to versions of Dracula, his variety of characters, settings, and references rivals Borges’s encyclopedic world. But range doesn’t equate to greatness. It is because of his unique style, his preoccupation with form, and his urgently contemporary topics that Laiseca strikes one as an unjustly underrated writer. Throughout his novels, he portrayed the culture of totalitarian states and chronicled the formation of the authoritarian personality. In El jardín de las máquinas parlantes, he delved into the world of schizophrenia and mental institutions. In El gusano máximo de la vida misma he described the curse of literary belatedness, of having arrived to literature at too late a historical date. Stylistically he was a baroque craftsman of sentences, and formally he spent thirty years experimenting with the possibilities of la novela-río (Los Sorias), the borders of fiction and nonfiction (Por favor ¡Plágienme!), the literary pastiche (Poemas Chinos), and the fantastic-historical novel (La hija de Kheops).
The overarching term that Laiseca gave his multifaceted work was realismo delirante. Similar to the notion of esperpento as developed by Valle-Inclán, Laiseca defined his one-man school as an attempt to apprehend reality precisely by distorting it to the point of insanity. This translated into an exuberant prose full of hallucinations, flights into alternative realities, and references to various religions and sects. This rich aesthetic was probably a response to his growing up in something of a cultural and geographical desert (la pampa), but, more importantly, it was a challenge to a literature dominated by Borges. If Borges played delicate intertextual games, Laiseca offered a cannibalistic take on the encyclopedia; to the elegant erudition of the former, the latter presented a pantagruelic ransacking of tradition. Multiple passages of Los Sorias attest to this intertextual voracity, where characters can’t help but sidetrack into non sequiturs on mathematics, astrology, or military tactics. Laiseca’s delirium, then, comes as much from a deranged vision of reality as from a saturation of references. Unfolding in crude displays of disparate knowledge, his novels epitomize what could be termed an enumerative style. Both his historical and esoteric fictions are consciously ethnographic, listing the characteristics of societies (real or imagined), describing customs and manners with the minutia of an anthropologist. Laiseca is more concerned with worldbuilding than character building and so, like Borges, he is disdainful of the psychological (or psicologizante) brand of fiction writing.
Certain divisions are required to discuss Laiseca’s works in greater detail. His texts fall into three main categories: the historical narratives, the novelas-río constructed around Laiseca’s particular esoteric cosmos, and the mixed works fueled on metaliterary structures and a cannibalistic idea of intertextuality. These partitions are the compass I will follow when evaluating Laiseca’s individual texts, but for the sake of space, I will restrict myself to those published in his prime around the nineties: La hija de Kheops (1989), La mujer en la muralla (1990), El jardín de las máquinas parlantes (1993), Los Sorias (1998), and El gusano máximo de la vida misma (1999).
Before commenting on Laiseca’s historical fictions, it is worth describing what use he made of the genre, and what tropes he made a point of avoiding. Chief among these truisms is the literary strategy that uses the past to understand the present. History was for Laiseca a form of liberation from the constraints (and so the questions) of the present, a playground where he could indulge in one’s fantasies, often of a sexual order. In this reimagining of the past, he resembles many other Latin American writers who blended the fantastic and historical genres, such as Alejo Carpentier and Manuel Mujica Láinez. Another staple of historical fiction is to concentrate the narrative on its most salient protagonists, Memoirs of Hadrian (translated by Grace Frick) being the quintessential example. And while his novels feature the high and mighty, Laiseca was primarily interested in the lives of common men.
La Mujer en la muralla and La hija de Kheops are alike in two ways: both deal with watershed moments in the history of architecture and take as their point of departure anecdotes handed down by history. The project of Kheops, which narrates the construction of the famous pyramid, first occurred to Laiseca when he read a story of Herodotus’s, relating how Khufu’s daughter prostituted herself to fund her father’s mausoleum. La Mujer originates in the folktale of Lady Meng Jiang, and her quest for her husband across the length of the Great Wall. Yet, much more important than these originating intertexts are Mika Waltari’s The Egyptian and Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian. As Aira remarked in his review of Kheops, Waltari wrote the seven hundred opening pages of Laiseca’s novel, so that the Argentinian would give up the challenge of writing an accurate account of Ancient Egypt; the same could be said about Sima Qian. With The Egyptian and Records covering their respective periods in a historically faithful manner, Laiseca can give himself free reign to fantasize about the IV Dynasty and the Qin Empire, indulge in implausible sex scenes, describe a day in the life of a mental health hospital by the Nile, or the invention of electricity in China’s third century B.C.. In his sprawling fantasies, he presents a wide range of characters, from pharaohs to fishermen and thieves, from architects to astrologers and generals. The workers of these monuments and the people who suffered the heavy taxation that such constructions demanded, have a starring part in these novels.
As for the style, Laiseca wraps his sentences in the symbols, images, and tropes belonging to the respective periods, in a parodic mimicry of the lore and platitudes of the ages:
The cleric began to walk across the enormous hall, with Tofis behind. The movement meant nothing from the point of view of relief, since the Enemies of the Human Race, the Arrows of Seth, the Flying Crocodiles, still overflew him. The ear’s mosquito had already decided, it seemed, that he had authority enough to be anointed as High Priest of a new theophagous cult, since he called other ecclesiastics, brothers of his, to join the bloodthirsty worship of Tofis’s auricular pavilion.
As Laiseca says, a truly authentic history of Egypt ought to interrupt itself every three lines to talk about mosquitoes, and this is a prime example of such intermissions. Equally, La mujer en la muralla constantly digresses into embedded folktales featuring the usual cast of characters from Chinese mythology (dragons, traveling wise men, cherry trees, the Yellow Torrents). In direct contrast to this aping of historical models, Laiseca makes use of porteño words, contemporary slang, and other linguistic anachronisms, such as when the daughter of Kheops calls her lover puto or guacho. Another notable trait of his is maintaining the pretence of historical rigour via a series of footnotes in which he gives false explanations to different aspects of these distant cultures. This peaks in Chapter 8 of La Mujer, where he forges two hanzis and spends several footnotes unpacking their cryptic meanings.
In these historical novels, Laiseca followed in the footsteps of other masters; in his novelas-río he stands in a world of his own. With the exception of Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus, it is difficult to trace any clear influence over these novels. Laiseca worked between science fiction and fantasy, using both the tropes of techno-futurism and magic. In terms of originality, it is this intermingling of ancient astrology and machine cults that is distinctly Laisecian—that and the deranged cosmos he articulated in these novels. Both El jardín and Los Sorias are set in alternative realities with an alternative geography, lexicon, and pantheon. There is the religion of Exateísmo, made up of six Aztec-sounding gods, and a priesthood dedicated to human sacrifice; and a manichean cult that has the Anti-Ser as the Devil, and pits the forces of Mozart against those of Anti-Mozart. In these uchronies, the people talk in a Laiseca-made lexicon, with three of these words deserving a bit of commentary: esotes or chichis are those who work for the Anti-Ser; manijear means to haunt and manijas are any form of incantation or plot devised against someone. As for their geographies, El Jardín is set in a wizard-ridden country that mirrors Argentina; Los Sorias takes place on the continent of Eurisberia, dominated by three powers: the USSR, Technocracy, and Soria. The first is organized around a sort of trade union absolutism, Technocracy is a technology-worshipping version of Nazi Germany, and Soria is modeled after different forms of Hispanic totalitarianism (Franco’s Spain and the Argentinian dictatorships of the seventies). As opposed to the historical novels, these works strive to comment upon the history of the 20th century and evaluate contemporary problems in a strategy that is typical of allegorical science fiction.
Mental health is the prism through which El jardín de las máquinas parlantes speaks. Its protagonist is Sotelo, a writer of unfinished texts who is being manijeado across four fronts: he has taken a vow of celibacy out of misogyny; he is a failed writer; he lacks brotherhood towards his friends; and he is obsessed with trade unions. Disparate as these things may seem, every emotional or mental state in this novel is the product of the occult forces operating on the individual. Within its seven hundred pages, the novel chronicles the process of challenging these mental and magical traps. It opens with Sotelo being interred in a psychiatric hospital, and follows with an attack on mental health institutions across several chapters featuring a stylistic device that will recur throughout. Around Sotelo, the dialogues between his fellow inmates overlap in a cacophony of interjections, neologisms, and rambles. Someone gives commands to his imaginary legions while someone else accuses someone else of homosexuality while that someone crowns himself king. Sotelo listens to all and interprets every utterance as a commentary on his manija. His friends come to the rescue, take him out of the hospital, and from that point onwards the novel relates Sotelo’s esoteric education and his struggles against the many-levelled hierarchy of invisible machines that haunt him. Each one of these ghosts is a representation of his initial obsessions and traumas: castration, sodomy, and trade unions. They are not seen but heard, and their conversations are as chaotic and off-topic as those in the sanatorium. Following the same technique of superimposed lines of dialogue mixed with waffling rants, Laiseca gives pages that bring to mind Alfred Jarry and the fruitless dialogues of Samuel Beckett:
—This is witchescoventous. . .
“What is witchescoventous? Oooff. . !” “Yo: what’s up with Juancito who shat fireoooff. . !” “Yo: two machines blew up there. So strange. They died when both of them uttered the same phrase: what is that it is oofff. . ! Careful; let no one dare to say what is it that it is ooof. . !” “Halt: stop. High-command order. Absolutely prohibited to say what is it that it is ooof. . !” “But I don’t understand. What’s so bad about saying what is that it is ooof. . !” “Attention: absolute silence. Orden from Central Machines, who have burnt too as they transmitted it: strictly prohibited to say what is that it is oooff. . !
Those are some machines being destroyed in the process of decoding the meaning of Sotelo’s utterance. The abrasive, absurd repetitions, and Laiseca’s proneness to neologism and musicality, is something that we will see developed in many lyrical passages of his masterpiece.
All the works discussed so far deserve much more attention than they have received, but if one had to select a novel to be translated into English, the choice would be, without a doubt, Los Sorias. One thousand and three hundred pages, more than a hundred characters, 170 chapters, this novel accumulates all of Laiseca’s obsessions. It took ten years to write and fifteen to publish; it has seen four editions in Argentina and less than five thousand copies printed, which its publisher Simurg sells at astronomic prices (the 2017 edition is $60). This has only helped spread the legend of Los Sorias and reduce the number of its actual readers, making it an unfeasible (economically and otherwise) cult classic. It is a book that begs to be taken from the hands of its copyright holders and put in the hands of wider audiences. That no publisher has seen fit to circulate this masterpiece across Latin America and Spain is astonishing.
The novel relates Technocracy’s war against Soria and the USSR. A certain North Chanchín is in conflict with a certain South Chanchín; Soria and the USSR side with the former, Technocracy supports the latter. This Vietnamese preamble leads then to a reimagining of World War II, with Technocracy playing the part of Germany. All goes well on both the Sorian and the USSR fronts until the technocratic armies are stalled in Samarcanda. Soria turns the war in its favor and begins to plan massive architectural reconstructions for the enemy capitol they are steps away from razing. This conflict, which Laiseca describes with military and logistic detail, is the canvas on which he unfolds two contemporary problems: authoritarianism and the humanization of power. Throughout multiple chapters, the novel describes the mechanisms and enforcement of a police state across Technocracy and Soria. Some passages ring closer to home, such as when he tells of a series of arrests and disappearances of artists, a common practice of Argentina’s dictatorship. Writers and intellectuals complicit in the different totalitarian regimes play a central role in this novel, as their works of propaganda are essential in the creation of dictatorial subordinates. But the key character, carrying all these themes, is Monitor, the head of Technocracy. Humorously modelled on the image of Hitler, he is a failed director of snuff movies, who has been recording tortures and executions throughout his reign, hoping to turn them into a movie someday. This piece of backgrounding suggests the origins of Monitor’s (and Hitler’s) evil: creative impotence. As read from the point of view of the protagonist, the novel is the story of the humanization of a brutal dictator. No friend of redemptive conclusions, just when Laiseca is beginning to reveal a less cruel Monitor, the war takes a turn, and los sorias march into Technocracy.
We should not overstate the importance of Monitor; the real protagonist here is the society of Technocracy. The court, its pastry-makers and buffoons; the slums and their hierarchies of beggars; the temples, their priests, and their theologies; the literature, the music, the architecture, and the cuisine—all make their appearance in this ethnographic account of the manners and customs of Technocracy. Even when following a reduced set of characters, the novel is structured as a series of self-concluding vignettes that introduce different aspects of vida tecnocrática. With such a flexible structure, reminiscent of the one employed by Rabelais and Cervantes, Laiseca can indulge in the enumerative style at which he excels. The most outrageous instance of this can be found in Chapter 131: El Falso Bayreuth. Two beggars decide to build an imitation of Wagner’s opera house. Across more than fifty pages, Laiseca tells of the selection of the place for construction, hidden between four giant trees; the felling of the forest; the difficulties of digging between the roots; specifying the exact materials purchased for the groundwork; listing the repertoire of the real and invented operas that will be performed; describing the use of siege towers to finish the dome; the style of the hall, with a staircase made of piled-up drawers; and the façade, half copy of the Universidad de Alcalá de Soria, half copy of French Renaissance and “gótico radiante”; the buffet, made according to their beggarly tastes; the seating plan, with the Monitor’s seat of honor shaped in the form of a hornero’s nest; the makeup and props used; their attempt at fabricating Siegfried’s sword; the gargantuan variety of shoes; and a very long etcetera that I can in no way detail here: Laiseca’s imaginative power and capacity for description is beyond paraphrasing, as is his verbal craftmanship.
I have said earlier that the cosmos of Los Sorias and El Jardín have no clear predecessor, but a productive comparison (and not only regarding matters of style) could be made with Bulgákov’s The Master and Margarita (translated by Katherine Tiernan O’Connor). Like that novel, Los Sorias engages in a thorough critique of authoritarianism; the enumerative, hallucinatory style of the “Ball at Satan’s” is Laiseca’s own trademark; the transposition of current events into a fantastical setting, the deployment of various metatextual levels, and the use of writers as focal points, are traits shared by both authors. Many other connections could be noted here but the point is to give a sense of Laiseca’s stylistic forebearers. To this expressionist delirium we have to add another influence, that of surrealism, to arrive at the kind of sentence that is Laiseca’s own. Through the creative reception that the likes of Osvaldo Lamborghini made of the French avant-gardes, Laiseca came to a kind of image- and sentence-composition that is better explained by way of quotation:
Colors suddenly turned heraldic: azures, gules, sable, sinople and purpure. A spattering of torches. Banners up in flames; shields and lineages blowing into boreal serpents. The scene rose in fragments, like golden ducal whorls without diadems. A soldier, sacralized by the fire of another’s flamethrower. A tank as mirror of a neighbouring one, upside down, destroyed too. Brown branded with silver. Gamopetalous whorls, irregular, lipshaped. Regularly polypetalous. Dented unguiculate petals. Fire showed itself domed, cruciform; then turned infusibellyformed, like the whorl of a bindweed. It came to exhaustion, like withered caryophyllaceae or butterflying embers.
This paragraph, describing the scenery at the battle of Samarcanda, is written along the lines of Rimbaud’s “Voyelles,” and in the tradition of many baroque Latin American stylists, such as Lezama Lima, of whose lineage Laiseca is one of the most important heirs in the late twentieth century.
As should be evident by now, Laiseca’s work is largely metaliterary and intertextual, but nowhere is this strain more evident than in El gusano máximo de la vida. This novel recounts the sexual adventures of a snail through New York’s sewer system, where he finds a Dantesque ecosystem full of alligators and rats presided over by the rule of sex-obsessed Dorys. In Rabelesian fashion, the text is dedicated to the description of feasts, orgies, and battles. The lifestyle of the underground is as profligate as their relation to the classics, with the monarch and her entourage slipping a Shakespearean quote every two sentences. The narrator gets so carried away by this habit that after a page of lines from the Bard, he wraps up the book abruptly lest he should transcribe all of Hamlet’s quotables. This compulsive intertextuality is not confined to the limits of tradition; Laiseca’s own works make an appearance. On page 122, the snail (a writer himself) inserts some scattered tales from a Chinese detective short story collection he published some years ago, featuring a certain Judge Lai Chú that reminds one of La mujer en la muralla. In another section, the snail quotes Laiseca’s novel Los Sorias; elsewhere he explains why Su turno, Laiseca’s first novel, came to be published as Su turno para morir. The text is furthermore peppered with many digressions that criticize the faulty composition of the novel itself. This commentary of the character-author as writer leads to a commentary on the character-author as reader, and allows Laiseca to intersperse his biography between the sexual conquests of the protagonist. After lengthy detours which follow his youth in the town of Camilo Aldao, Laiseca lists his first readings, among which he counts Pinocchio, Little Men, Jules Verne, and Salgari, and relates his early passion for history.
This unseemly cocktail of biographical and literary references sums up Laiseca’s idea of literature as a plagiarizing activity. In the light of this work, and in relation to everything discussed so far, we can give a wider-known cognate to Laiseca’s realismo delirante. Many Spanish critics used to scratch their heads to no use trying to find a Spanish-language equivalent to Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace. The emergence of Bolaño seemed to put an end to their quest, but it is my opinion that they could have satiated their thirst for postmodern fiction had they abandoned their straightforward North to South comparisons and looked at a page or two of Los Sorias. This novel is one of the greatest feats of literary postmodernism written in Spanish. The inevitability of pastiche, the mixture of genres, a certain desperate hilarity before the barbarities of history, a cartoonish, hallucinatory style, the overwhelming sensation of having arrived after the classics, are only so many traits that Laiseca shares with this school. But that is as far as the comparisons with Pynchon, Wallace, or Bolaño can go. Whereas the Chilean forsook the baroque tradition in favour of a plainer style (he was once called “the antidote to the sickness of Spanish: the baroque”), Laiseca steeped his work in the elaborate lineage that stems from Góngora. If I were to recommend this writer on the basis of a formula, it would be this distinction that makes the strongest case: he represents the marriage between Spanish baroque style and the formal structures of postmodernism.
Despite these superlative qualities, it doesn’t seem like his work garners any new readers. Just like Bolaño, unread until he was translated into English, Laiseca may need, if his literature is to survive, the acceptance of the English-speaking world. Recognition abroad would mean recognition at home, as Spanish-language readers unfortunately look down upon anything that hasn’t received the laurels of the English press, and can only recognize a classic once it has passed through the offices of FSG. The fact that he hasn’t been translated in this post-Bolaño craze is surprising. The blog Untranslated ranks Los Sorias as the book most urgently in need of an English-language translation. This oblivion of the Anglophone world was particularly painful to a writer educated in the English masters of genre fiction (Poe, Haggard, Lovecraft). More than French or German, his lifelong dream, he said in an interview, was to be translated into English. As a reader and admirer of Laiseca, I don’t despair in this dream of his. Piglia says in his prologue to Los Sorias that all Argentinian underground classics take about three decades to achieve the recognition they deserve. Twenty-one years after the publication of Los Sorias, I think the time has come for this novel to find its readers.
