Macho Camacho's Beat
Christ, Ronald
Submerged in a swarming choreography MACHO CAMACHO'S BEAT Luis Rafael Sanchez Translated by Gregory Rabassa Pantheon, $10.95, 211 pp. Ronald Christ "AND the beat goes on, and the beat goes on,...
...Imagine the which hunt for all those references...
...If anyone has been bored by Macho Camacho's Beat, it has not been Rabassa...
...All the devices, including the petty (Joycean...
...By contrast, that instantaneity, that groovy moment right now, separates Sanchez's people from the characters in Puig's Heartbreak Tango, people for whom drooping lyrics of milongas and tangos mark life's literal pulse...
...The Beat strikes rhythmic sparks at first, then sputters...
...Ronald Christ "AND the beat goes on, and the beat goes on, and the beat goes on...
...Dalloway, what ties Sanchez's characters together is the novelist's crisscrossing of daily lives in ways unrecognized by the characters themselves...
...These stylistic shenanigans display the author's flashy control of the slippery matter of popular culture, political consequence, and vulgar drama...
...As in Ulysses and Mrs...
...Anglos may get the idea that Puerto Ricans are as complex, as varied, as human as themselves - what will we do with all the stereotypes then...
...Beginning successive units of prose with identical words or phrases, Sanchez self-consciously organizes his novel- he's nothing if he's not a writer who knows what he's doing-with the rhetorical device of anaphora...
...Which, again, is too bad...
...but no doubting that this novel presents more than "lowlife Puerto Ricans" - though they're there too-and no doubting, either, that presumably highlife "Anglos" will never learn the infinite variety of Puerto Rican types from Sanchez...
...To realize that, however, you must first clear the literary dance floor...
...droned Sonny and Cher in the 60s...
...Joyce used the vice-regal cavalcade, Woolf the dove-grey limousine as well as a sky-writing plane, and Sanchez his guaracha lyric "Life is a Phenomenal Thing," which has taken the fictional island by storm and invaded every character's life with the devastation of Garcia Marquez's Leafstorm...
...He is still-along with Helen R. Lane-the best, the most flexible, the most literate translator of Spanish and Portuguese fiction into English...
...Second, any work of literature that aspires to the condition of music, as this one does, loudly, cannot be translated as such: its music, both in the notes of its syllables and the rhythm of its phrases, is precisely what cannot carry from one language to another, certainly not from a Romance language to English...
...In this book, which is a funhouse hall of verbal mirrors, he romps, struts, wiggles, and glistens, producing, not the dull symmetry of expression in two languages-the kind of schematic reflection implicit in face-to-face translations of prose-but a joyous razzle dazzle of pun and rhetorical figure properly congruent with Sanchez's highly figured prose...
...the result is deadly-as if Joyce had written all of Ulysses in a single narrative technique, that of the "Wandering Rocks" section, say...
...No honor that, to any publisher: only a burden to writer and translator, a burden having nothing to do with inherent worth...
...Freed from these ethnic cheerleaders and translation-workshop boo-ers, Macho Camacho's Beat prances into the cosmopolitan form of the city-in-a-day book invented and patented in English by James Joyce, that other colonial writer, and delicately pirated by Virginia Woolf, that other oppressed individual...
...Hard to answer, especially when you can't tell who that final "we" includes...
...All together, their effect is like listening non-stop to six albums of "The Bessie Smith Story": after a while, your anticipation of the repetition makes you, not the work, wild...
...Macho Camacho's Beat will be hawked as a sing-song Grito de San Juan in literature and anatomized by chill-fingered academics...
...It should be banned or censored or, at least, not allowed to fall into the hands of Anglos...
...To begin, this is the first Puerto Rican novel translated into English...
...Therefore, to find fault with the translator for not having produced the music of Sanchez's book is to declare one's ignorance of what any translator can do...
...Obviously, then, Sanchez introduces his novel into very good literary company, and does so with an appropriate modesty of range in character and theme for a first novel...
...Sanchez swaggers beyond those two in submerging his characters in a swarming choreography of people, motifs, and expressions, so that his novel is almost all corps, no principal dancers, even though there are a few identifiable performers, like the Mother who leaves her idiot baby out in the tropical sun, Senator Vincente Reinosa, whose son Benny conducts a teenager's hot romance with his Ferrari, which crashes the book, expectedly, into a liebestodt of post-Faulknerian-a-la-Hitchcock "brains splattered on the door of the Ferrari and . . . some eyes plopped in the gutter like the yokes of half-fried eggs...
...He radically miscalculates, on the other hand: Whereas the writers I've just cited all multiply and manner literary devices to clump characters in verbal communities, Sanchez relies on just one...
...More closely, Macho Camacho's Beat resembles Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers, which on a vaster scale of space, time, and thought instantized life in Cuba at the brink of Fidel's revolution...
...They are all suspended-undigested and undigesti-ble alike-in the hip-jiggling medium of the guaracha, imitated by anaphoric bumps that keep all the clutter of high and low culture trivia swinging in a stew the way a Cusinart on pulse makes soup...
...Gregory Rabassa can do a lot...
...not the work, wild...
...Lastly, the kind of all-too-typical praise quoted on the dust jacket can only harm Sanchez's chance of making it among people who read novels instead of rah-rahing books that coincide with their own canting interests: Luis Rafael Sanchez's novel is a scandal...
...San: chez is too funny about his lowlife Puerto Ricans, too mordant, too compassionate: regular Philip Roth let loose on the island...
...Too bad, because any few sections of the book read fast and cool: breezy prose refrains of imitable identity...
...references to things only a certain set of Puerto Ri-cans and their friends in San Juan might care about-like the allusion to Rafi Rodriguez (Rabarra's colleague at Queens College who commutes from Puerto Rico) and his Tamayo (which hangs in his New York apartment)-float in the prose rhythm...
...Finally, it tics...
...Any reader of Luis Rafael Sanchez's Macho Camacho's Beat will probably add, "And on, and on, and on-and on...
...flutter of novelty, Sanchez's work is lively and admirable, a good first novel by an industrious and talented writer...
...but the deadening effect of prose drone-the insistence on one figure of repetition, a kind of Motown metrics for prose-almost drowns out the praise or respect you might voice for the novel...
...Which is too bad...
...That swirling, spicy soup is Sanchez's vision of contemporary Puerto Rico...
...Despite the burden of condescending praise, ignorant demands on translation, and the "Oh, wow...
...Here's a sam-pie: Turn after turn, she sits down to wait sitting down, to wait sweaty on the sweaty sofa, vox populi has it that African fires scorch the isle of Puerto Pico, to wait in perspiration: because the light has gone, because the light goes every afternoon, because the afternoon doesn't work, because the air-conditioning doesn't work, because the country doesn't work . . . The novel flashes images like a movie projector with a broken ratchet...
...So let's forget the dried laurel and leave the truly awesome responsibilities of neglect and performance to historians of literature, sociologists, and other lobbyists...
...Of course Sanchez does vary the trick by complicating his style with puns, allusions, and rhymes, but many of these are annoyingly repetitive too, like the interminable repetitions of and variations on "Vince is a prince, no accidents, clean rinse...
...Of course it's a different beat: the tangy, frenetic, myriad beat of the guaracha...
...What they might learn, however, is the vision, craft, and ambition of Sanchez's book...
Vol. 108 • May 1981 • No. 9
