“Gunter’s Winter”, the Paraguayan novel by Juan Manuel Marcos (1950), is, according to the translator or the publisher, literary work The most important in Paraguay twenty years ago. It’s not for us, who haven’t seen enough of Paraguayan literature, except to take it for granted. However, we did not fully understand how the translator or editor continued to describe the owner of such an important work of fiction as a thinker. We also don’t understand how the work remains the most important throughout the twenty years.
But what is certain is that the writer of the novel, who has defected dullness During the dictatorship, he went to the United States to work as a professor at a university, and returned once the dictatorship ended. What is certain is that Juan Manuel Marcos has an importance in Paraguayan culture today.
The novelist in the winter of “Gunter” (edited by “Dar Al-Farabi” translated by Tariq Abdel-Hamid) is not alone the presentbut it is strong. The novel is full of characters. If we simplify further, we say it is full of relationships. We move inside, among people who come from different classes, priests, soldiers, officers, ordinary people… and prostitutes.
Something suggests that we are facing Paraguay. We find characters of all kinds here, but there is something that suggests that behind them, behind each of them, there is something like a story, something like a model. This is how we still smell Paraguay, its historical and social structure, throughout the novel.
The writer switches from detailed narration to poem without warning or introduction
We are so in front of Paraguay, drawn and spoken. From this we can understand the place of the novel in Paraguayan literature. She, not directly or closely, paints Paraguay, but she almost sings about it. Paraguay is thus constructed and diagnosed by people’s relationships, voices and movements, and these vary and multiply, or allow us to glimpse sketches and drawings, signs and long and short narratives.
Thus, we can see from the reading that Juan Manuel Marcos is not the only one returning to Paraguay. His novel is also a return to it. Thus, the novel, with its characters returning to the countryside, almost carries, from near or far, not only the story of the novelist, but also his nostalgia for his country, his nostalgia, his recovery, and the he even gets rich with Paraguay.
This is what can be glimpsed behind the speech, which does not risk romantic representation or emotional overflow, but rather works, through an almost singing realism and through rapid or sweeping portraits, to a vivid visualization of the Paraguayan place.
Hence the writing of Juan Manuel Marcos multiplies, indeed comes out of itself, and moves between literary and intellectual genres. The novel thus distances itself from the novel, as it contains other things within it. Here the thinker may be present, the psychoanalyst may also be present, but what is there is there, with a sort of intuitiveness, communication, emanation, natural and immediate presence, and what resembles improvisation. What thus appears as a synthesis of the discourse and its end is the poem.
Juan Manuel Marcos in the novel passes, without warning or introduction, from detailed narration to poetry that does not ask permission before answering. It overlaps a previous text, as if it were its continuation, but it is only poetry. Poetry pretends to be narration, it speaks as narration, but it remains poetry, even pure poetry: “Leave me, the fibers of the boy’s naked body rage without restraint… Another explosion in the square of Alacidonia… There the walls scream with a piercing whistle… Perhaps no one will look for hunting wings, nor how the morning dew suddenly appears, comets creep in… It is the stubborn amazement of being young… This air is not yours and the world belongs to nobody… Come on, put your signature and retire.” Poetry in the folds of the novel, poetry that arises by itself suddenly and uninvited.
Not just pure poetry, but also poetic characters and poetic endings. Soledad is also a presence in the depth and strength of the poem. Her life and her death are murdered, and her life, which oscillates between dreams and prostitution, is also a poem.
* My Lebanese poet
