The deluded killing machine
By Rogelio Lart
Paradiso. 213 pages
That he has studied Political Science at the UBA may be able to explain the enormous variety and tone of Rogelio Lart when writing The deluded killing machine, his first book of stories. Maybe that is it, maybe not, but the concrete thing is that the material is surprising first because of the multiple and ambitious nature of its themes.
From a peasant turned worker in prewar Moscow – many sensations to 1984-, we go to the origin of fire at the dawn of humanity, to the Mexico of the Conquest in “To kill a king.” But not everything is historical: there are several stories about today’s characters, from here to the corner. There is the caretaker who has to “bank” the husband’s bum in “Eskimos”, for example.
“Arderán”, the first story, focuses on a mysterious character, a supposed arsonist, who provokes the imagination and gossip of the town. We never really know who the guy is, but the story takes us by the nose to unexpected places.
There are clear ideas, intentions, decision in Lart. In general, its protagonists are workers, lúmpenes, also employees. However, in the painful “In the Cloud” he delves into a higher class. And the sentimental cross, without a doubt, is constituted by “Gold”, emotional, nostalgic, powerful.
A certain nostalgia also seeps into “Luz proper” that recreates the origin of the album cover. Peperina of Serú Girán.
The last story -where the title of the work appears- uses the ways of the academy to relate the origin of the guillotine. There we are told that “originality is scarce. The audacious prominence of certain ideas has been achieved not thanks to the applied genius of some, but through the precise intervention of secondary and unknown actors ”. It is these secondary and unknown actors who populate the pages of The deluded killing machine and those that make the material as entertaining as it is challenging.
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