between Pinochet, the Amazon jungle and the guilt of the Holocaust

On the Amazon jungle, Pinochet and inclusive language

Cristian Alarcón has won the Alfaguara Prize with this risky hybrid work that reflects on memory

★★★★☆

By Diego GANDARA

Neither earthly nor heavenly nor artificial paradises. There is another paradise, which is nothing more than the intimate territory that each one cultivates in his own way, with its close and simple things, through individual acts and gestures that are also part of a larger and collective act, even universal. . The paradise that the Chilean writer and journalist Cristian Alarcón imagines and proposes (although he has lived in Argentina for years, where he has been in charge of several graphic media) in “The Third Paradise”, a novel that won the Alfaguara Prize, is located on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, in a cabin to which the protagonist goes scared by the incipient confinement at the beginning of 2020.

There, while waiting for the future to arrive in the worst possible way, he entertains himself by cultivating a garden full of plants and colors. Although the setting of the novel at times acquires the atmosphere of an intimate place, its bucolic and botanical landscape is also the place where other things flourish that, until then, had remained hidden in the mist of time, such as the memory of the dahlias that that his grandmother Alba had, the threatening presence of the Amazon jungle that Alexander von Humboldt explored at the end of the 18th century and the history of his Chilean family, whose roots were uprooted from Daglipulli during the Pinochet dictatorship. Far, however, from autofiction or autobiography, it is a novel of coral framework with a variety of voices and languages ​​that try to capture a present that actually vanishes through history. A loose, colloquial language that comes both from inclusive language, from the millennial, from “queer” theory and from the various feminisms and environmental movements.

time and fiction

Thus, “The Third Paradise” is an eminently current work. And not only because it traces a story that takes place in the near present, but because in its architecture it combines the assembly of voices and styles and genres in a formidable arrangement between essay, memory and the purest and most genuine narration. The result is a well-rounded book, solidly constructed, that attracts for what it tells, a hybrid between plot and knowledge, and because it shows that, in the present time, fiction can be made.

▲ The best

The greatest attraction of the novel is undoubtedly its commitment to illuminate the little things

▼ worst

The use of colloquial language, with forms and idioms, can make a classic reader uncomfortable

–