Centroeuropa by Vicente Luis Mora

From Bellevue Literary Press: 

Vicente Luis Mora’s Centroeuropa has one of the most charismatic unreliable narrators I’ve encountered in some time, and weds a wonderfully character-centric perspective to big, unexplained speculative ele­ments. For such a tidy little book, it is packed full of interesting asides and odd details, be­guiling and voice-forward in a way that makes it feel like something much larger. For all that the protagonist and the situation visibly resist giving up their secrets, it’s also a strangely inviting text – it confides, it confesses, even as it obscures and misdirects.

Translated from the Spanish by Rahul Bery (in a remarkable tone-shift from his excel­lent work on Michel Nieva’s louder and more febrile Dengue Boy), Luis Mora’s novel is the journal of one Redo Hauptshammer, a recently widowed city-dweller who is trying to start a new life as a farmer in Prussia in the early 19th century. When Redo attempts to dig a grave, though, or plow the fields, the earth yields up strange treasures: frozen bodies of soldiers. The first bodies seem to be from the Napo­leonic wars – odd, but not inexplicable – but they’re soon joined by Roman legions and even stranger corpses, ones that we readers, though not Redo or the townspeople, can deduce are from World War Two and beyond.

This very magical-realist situation has con­crete and glaring consequences for Redo, who’s unable to farm as political and religious leaders dither about how to handle the situation, and, atop and beside this central mystery, other oddities and enigmas accrue. The village is home to a mostly friendly giant who seems to be always changing sizes; Redo is befriended by a witch with odd insights and cryptic advice; and over all of this is Redo’s narration, which constantly makes clear to us an essential fur­tiveness and unreliability. Even though some aspects of this are crystal clear – that our nar­rator is concealing something about sexuality or gender presentation from the town and from the reader is obvious – the effort Redo visibly expends in obfuscating is delightful, beguiling, in some places humorous and in others deeply sympathetic. “I will always have to control my behavior, voice, and language. I will never be able to be who I really am.” Always hinting at what’s not being said – fearful in one sec­tion, regretful in another, often with a sort of winning hubris – Redo’s attempts to grieve, to deal with the supernatural situation, and to make friends and connections in this new home are really engaging, and although both the comic and magical elements sometimes loom large, the human stakes and emotion are always central.

I found myself noting some interesting resonances between Centroeuropa and Isaac Fellman’s recent Notes from A Regicide. Besides the topical similarities – the oddly preserved bodies underground, the actualiza­tion of sexuality and gender, the feeling of vast historical forces moving around our charac­ters – there’s something fascinating about the role speculative elements play here. As with Fellman’s, one can pretty easily imagine a ver­sion of Luis Mora’s novel that dispenses with these elements and remains quite a strong but wholly realistic work. Yet, in both cases, there is something central about their irrealisms. Not a mere accessory or decoration, the strange­ness of Centroeuropa elevates and transforms Redo’s story, and sharpens its constant themes of deception and honesty into an intense bit of social commentary: “If we don’t see them, they don’t exist. If the horror is invisible, there is no horror.” And the speculative aspects here provide moments here of both fantastic mys­tery and of almost science-fictional sublime, as when a local heiress deploys her hot-air balloon to help move the frozen soldiers.

What carries this whole endeavor is the voice and style of the work. Lightly moving and prone to both subtle revelations and abrupt emotional intensity, Redo’s voice is consistently engaging and entertaining, almost a Melville-in-miniature in its digressions. There’s a lot going on here, on the surface and below: Even besides Redo’s often-obvious feints and omis­sions, there’s a sense of a masterful actor and liar who is still stressed and imperfect, with odd self-contradictions creeping into the story over time, and we get occasional footnotes on these inconsistencies from an exasperated (fictional) editor. The very incompleteness of the account adds to its believability – a partial view of complexity reads less artificial than a total view of simplicity. And, although it’s a poignant and unsettling tale along several axes, it’s also a very funny one, with excel­lent comedic sensibility for situations both absurd (as when Redo glances back and forth between a dearth of scarecrows and a surfeit of magically preserved corpses) and mundane (as when various people, sometimes uncomfort­ably hot ones, seem to be falling for or seducing our romantically unavailable protagonist). The narrator’s refusal to state something is often indistinguishable from humorous understate­ment, and there’s a lot of excellent and some­times multilingual wordplay – that the entire plot revolves around a personal re-invention by someone calling themselves “Redo,” which makes sense in Spanish (and English), but not German, is a pretty good bit.

In its use of consequential-but-impossible elements, its inventive style, and its rich psy­chological realism Centroeuropa further un­dermines the literary-genre divide. And, as fun and thought-provoking as its magical aspects are, it’s this last that most lingers for me. Redo’s personality, hopes, fears, and friendships leap off the page; the narrative has a tenderness to how it handles emotion and connection that convey their preciousness even if Redo holds them at arm’s length. Grief is never far, for Redo, but neither is love or the complexity of life – and the miracle here is that, even in death, they might be preserved for us. Highly recommended, and likely to be one of my top reads this year.