2023-05-21 19:05:00
There are more than one novels that are interwoven in the thick broth of the fingerpainterthe second work rescued by Carlos Catania from Rosario (1931) following the males.
The latter, once praised by Roberto Bolaño and put back in print by the Las Cuarenta label, ignited interest in an author as excessive as he was ignored who knew how to enjoy continental circulation and translations into other languages.
Dedicated to fiction and theater, Catania lived for an extensive period in Costa Rica, and the original publication of the fingerpainter in 1984 it coincides with his return to the country, following a regime of terror that the text leads to its plot.
The story begins with the initiatory sordidness of the police officer, outlining a character who returns to his town in Santa Fe in 1980 to practice the job of dactyloscopic expert, “undertaker upside down” who finds in the fingers of the dead the unique trait of someone who has left to exist.
This task from beyond the grave is carried out together with Los Inseparables, a police force indebted to a close childhood gang that is facing an ominous case.
Already this alternation between the heavy present and endearing memory of an autobiographical aspect (the finger painter is called Carlos, and Catania tried that job in his youth) activates the alert for a dissimilar body to which the story will not fail to add daring grafts.
the epic of the fingerpainter is that of the modern novel, and thus Catania explores multiple registers with virtuosity of boom Latin American (devotee of Musil, the author makes Saer live with Vargas Llosa) to the point of exhaustion.
Oneiric and crude, violent and elegiac, satirical and nihilistic, the narrative progresses in a state of grace: there is a baby describing its birth, an Indian curse, a ritual of religious torture, some prophetic “mongoliths”, a student who sleeps with his aging teacher, a 120-year-old townsman, and a prostitute undergoing a bestial duel.
The extreme bet is to superimpose morality and aberration, and that is why the voice of a mother from Plaza de Mayo who is looking for her disappeared son is uncomfortable. Silenced himself by the dictatorship –the males it was banned in Argentina in 1978–, Catania exhibits the miseries of the authoritarian order while unraveling the proverbial grayness of the finger-painter.
“My failure is cosmic,” the protagonist says at one point, aware of the cloudy footprint he leaves behind.
- the fingerpainter. . . . Charles Catania. UNL/Serapis. 406 pages. $ 5,3
1684696555
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