In my ever growing search for horror literature outside of the often formulaic and self-centered USA horror, I have often been bumping into really good books from Argentina which never fail to leave me impressed. This time it is shooting star Roque Larraquy's freshly translated work in which he explores themes such as exploitation or the limits of human ventures.
La Comemadre consists of two parts which
read like two independent novellas but are actually connected to each
other in many ways. The first part is set in 1907 in a Buenos Aires
clinic and focuses on a group of doctors (and one nurse that all of them
admire) who attempt to carry out an ethically very controversial
experiment with the use of a larvae-producing plant called “comemadre”,
to get a glimpse at what happens after death. It is a dreadful
imagination of scientists gone wrong, and the whole atmosphere of
madness, of doctors who lost their direction is nicely executed.
The
second part takes place about a century later and consists of a letter
from an unnamed Argentine performance artist to a researcher writing his
biography against his will. The artist is a wunderkind who has reached
fame at a very early age and later found another artist who looks like
his double and who has been fixated on our artist his whole life. The
two of them collaborate in macabre art projects that push the limits of
convention and taste, thus mirroring the behavior of the doctors who
preceded them and prompting questions like what or who is science for,
or what is art for? Is exploitation in their nature?
This is a
very small book and although I thought I'd quickly finish it, I still
needed to ponder on a lot and that made the read longer. Still, in the
end, there are some questions that went unanswered for me; for instance,
there are some connections between the two stories, the repetition of
elements like phrenology, bidets, even some sentences that the subjects
in the first experiments utter... I may re-read this book some time to
see if it is me who is missing something or if these are random
connections meant to hold the two stories together.
Although the style and language are endearing in the beginning, they kind of become tiresome towards the end and I personally needed to make a few pauses to collect my
thoughts. It had a very concise, overpowering ring to it, which, combined with the deeply intellectual content, requires a pause here and there. I have read a
translation and maybe that's the reason for that and also for
the main characters in both parts sounding same to me. But I'm willing too close my eyes on nuances that get lost in the process.
All in all a cerebral, provocative and macabre reflection, I would recommend it if that sounds good to you.
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