Hispanic Parable
BERGMAN, ANDREW
Hispanic Parable Thunder of the Roses By Manuel Peyrou Herder and Herder. 170 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Andrew Bergman Manuel Peyrou has until now remained unknown to the American reading public,...
...In each case they are lonely figures, prey to both predator and patriot, suspicious of all, able to confide in no one...
...the real dictator had been killed the night before...
...then his absorption in detective fiction obscures his vision from the possibilities of escape...
...The present is rendered tolerable for them only by oblivious distraction in the past, and a day's value inheres not in itself, but in the anniversary it signals...
...Did Felix know his victim's identity...
...If you begin by admitting inefficiency and the possibility of error, there would then be a place for healthy satire and criticism...
...Reviewed by Andrew Bergman Manuel Peyrou has until now remained unknown to the American reading public, but the appearance of Thunder of the Roses, the first of his novels to be translated into English, may change that...
...With a flourish of invention Peyrou offers a delightful, mordant account by one Hegi-sippe A. Croquebete (1724-1801), "French historian, essayist and humanist," of the populace's passion for commemoration...
...In short, this is a nation whose moral sense has gone to sleep, and where malignancy fills the air...
...The time is 1942...
...the dictator is called a Fiihrer...
...Yet Peyrou's book is far from a total success...
...Like everyone else, the authorities are caught: either knowingly supporting an impossible myth while cynically enjoying its appropriated perquisites, or capitulating to it and becoming the dangerous dupes of their own credulity...
...Hailed in an introduction by Jorge Luis Borges as "one of the first storytellers of Hispanic letters," Peyrou emerges as a writer of perception, ingenuity and extreme grace...
...Legitimized by power, murder is measured not in ethics but efficacy...
...Felix's naive idealism leads him to unrepentant murder...
...In such a context, causality becomes a web of fortuitousness-accident shapes life and self-determination is merely a fantasy...
...confessions prove spurious and alibis collapse...
...Expository material is presented through a variety of clever techniques that display an extraordinary range of recitative styles and perspectives...
...So pervasive and casual is the tone of barbarousness that even the small talk is of perfidy and decay...
...The citizens have a "prodigious memory for legendary things," their eyes fixed firmly in the past...
...Each day they direct their attention to the celebration of myth, as if to impose on undifferentiated time a consoling structure...
...Behavior, unfortunately, seems to spring more from the exigencies of plot than from the depths of character...
...oblique references are made to a prison camp from which no one returns...
...And if the revolutionary is acting out of unrealistic expectations about the effects of his actions, his antagonists within the government are no less dependent on illusion...
...As the detective explains to Felix: "My dear friend, under our regime it is impossible to speak freely because the government itself is based upon a lie...
...Nor are the main characters any freer than the populace from the bonds of fantasy...
...Reality turns out to be insubstantial, shifting, an elusive simulacrum of supposition...
...Thunder of the Roses also examines the nature of its own form: It plumbs the history of detective fiction, describing its requirements, applauding its qualities and documenting its ploys...
...As with so much modern fiction, Thunder of the Roses is involute, self-conscious about its existence and the processes of its own creation...
...its effects impoverished...
...It is this interpenetration of fact and fiction that is at the novel's center, and the intense human impulse toward fantasy is its most powerfully realized theme...
...Of course, this fact does not exonerate Felix, but it does complicate matters for detective Hans Buhle, and for Gesenius' successor, Hel-muth Bostrom...
...Peyrou's story begins with the murder of the dictator, Cuno Gesenius, by the revolutionary assassin, Felix Greitz, but no sooner is the fatal shot fired than the reversals start, turning truth around like a top...
...Was Gesenius' assassination the work of the ineffectual resistance group to which Felix belonged, or was it performed by some other agency, perhaps by a conspiracy within the government...
...There are analytic reports from Buhle to Bostrum, too, and a piece written by Felix...
...the prose, measured and restrained, with a scrupulous attention to precision: "To say that dawn broke is excessive for that dawn...
...The narrative is spare, elegant, laconic...
...Even the ending of the book offers only a direction for conjecture, not a complete resolution of doubt...
...the population is incited through patriotic slogans...
...That is the lie of efficiency...
...The presumption of infallability is far from constructive...
...For Peyrou's machinations are too programmatic, satisfying the requirements of logic but depriving Thunder of the Roses of the force and reverberation of individual personality...
...Peyrou handles these ideas and themes with skill...
...Despite the richness and intricacy of the texture, it is weak in its essentials: Attention is dispersed over a wide range of figures and themes, and the characters are never fully realized...
...it begins by restricting the horizons and ends up by blinding...
...His essay, a separate chapter analyzing a strategem?Hamlet's play within a play-is later employed by Buhle, as he attempts to crack the case...
...Motives remain elliptical, and powerful emotions are unpersuasive...
...Apparent explanations find swift refutation...
...better to say that dawn attempted weakly to make itself seen...
...The fact that physicians perform monstrous freezing experiments on political prisoners is treated as mere incidental detail...
...The book is set in an unnamed country of the southern hemisphere, but the inhabitants are curiously Nordics-almost uniformly blond, with Germanic names...
...Other information, subtly interspersed within the narrative, makes the parallel with the Third Reich multiform and exact: Carrying identification papers is obligatory...
...It was not Gesenius who was murdered but a double...
...Felix, for instance, is both a critic and an author of mystery stories...
...In the end, the novel's dynamism proves largely dialectical, leaving it curiously dessicated...
Vol. 55 • September 1972 • No. 17
