Book Review: Tinta Roja by Alberto Fuguet

When it comes to writers of unembellished prose who pierce the core of Western Man's dehumanized, lost and isolated condition, French author Michel Houellebecq is a sappy sentimentalist. In Platform, narrator Michel Renault's world is painted with the blunt and unambiguous strokes of contemporary France's meaningless consumerism and radical Islam's vapid violence. Against all odds, however, Renault finds true love. It's an improbable French love story. It's an inspiration to us all.

Tinta Roja "Red Ink", by Chilean author Alberto Fuguet, is far, far bleaker. This is because its main character Alfonso Fernández never finds love. At least, nothing that I can recognize as such. Even though Fernández would be much less likely to be diagnosed with clinical depression than Renault would, Red Ink paints a much gloomier picture of humanity, sending you on your way without a trace of redemption.

The story begins in the voice of a matured Fernández reflecting on his life, one which briefly shared the spotlight with the Chilean glitterati. He's a well-known author, past his prime but brimming with thoughts of upcoming projects, yet reduced to editing a credit card magazine. He's got a crush on the art director Cecilia Méndez who he frequently travels with, but he's not sure if she'll reciprocate.

In both work and love, he's not only semi-satisfied, but also hopeful. Vaguely content and still ambitious, he lives a comfortable, compromised bourgeois life - it's so realistic, understandable and therefore sinister. Renault, for his part, rejected extracting any sort of meaning from his daily (pre-love) existence, and drew sharp contrasts between the real and the meaningless. Fernández actually celebrates his own tepid, lifelike mediocrity.

A few pages into the book, the story abruptly glissando's to young buck Alfonso (and leaves you there till for most of the remaining 400-some-odd pages), fresh out of provincial journalism school and trying to make it in the big city of Santiago. He interns at a daily tabloid El Clamor (fictional version of La Cuarta), and what follows is a rapid succession of brief, movie-ready chapters each containing a neatly packaged anecdote which are usually violent, gripping, ironic and funny.

Not only is young Fernández working for the trashiest paper in town, but he gets thrown out onto the crime beat. The first assignment is to go cover a graveyard suicide-by-rope corpse, which swings lazily as the rope makes a quiet groaning sound. As the book progresses, Fernández' gag reflex cauterizes, somewhat, and his writing improves.

His boss, Saúl Faúndez, who schools him in the fine art of tabloid prose, is a dirty old man with a widow fetish. Fortunately, there's ample supply of those on the crime beat. During and in between that and equally inappropriate behavior, Faúndez' ribald musings on life are pure gold.

Faúndez never had a son to speak of, and Fernández never had a father to speak of, so they get on famously, in an oedipal kinda way: Fernández detests everything his surrogate dad is about, but ends up becoming just like him, kinda.

Oh, before I forget, really the only reason to read Red Ink is to improve your Spanish comprehension and pick up some nice Chilean slang, modismos or chilenismos. One of the best lines is when Faúndez asks his young apprentice:

Desde cuándo que no remojas el cochayuyo, Alfonso?

Which means, like, "when's the last time you soaked your seaweed?"

Another comical character is Escalona the photographer, who's a veritable expert in yellow journalism. One great example when they go to cover the corpse of a recently hit pedestrian. Due to profuse bleeding, the police on the scene have covered the body with newspapers. But there's a problem. It's the competition. So Escalona has Alfonso go to a kiosk and buy a stack of El Clamor, with which they drape the cadaver, on the sly, before Escalona can begin shooting.

Escalona considers himself a True Artist. When they all go out one night with call girl dates to an upscale titty bar, Escalona totally unloads upon a humble photographer who's going from table to table selling Polaroid portraits to willing couples. Escalona vehemently warns Fernández that a True Artist never stoops so low as to sell his Art as if it were a cheap commodity.

LOL.

One of Faúndez' most persistent lessons to Fernández throughout Red Ink is that in order for one to write of Truth, or write anything worth reading at all, it has to be a painfully uncomfortable experience. That's a nice little pearl of wisdom until you take a step back and ponder how anything in Red Ink could have been, in any way conceivable, uncomfortable to write. And if it was uncomfortable to write, then Fuguet is totally shallow. And even then, it's hardly worth reading, so it's material evidence against that very lesson. Right?

Perhaps that's the whole point. Fuguet's entire labor of love, highly autobiographical, is a dispensable piece of airport trash. Talk about bleak.

Still, I highly recommend this as an easy-intermediate leg up on Spanish reading comprehension and knowledge of Chilean slang, via a series of silly stories and many recognizable Santiago landmarks. I believe Fuguet's "Cine York" is the fictional version of the real-life Cine Normandie, although Tap Room is cited in all it's non-fictional glory.

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But wait there's more. Before reading the book you might want to study up on the meanings of these Spanish vocabulary words, so that you don't have to always reach for the Spanish-English dictionary while you read the book. So here are a few select mood-setting Spanish words and their meanings in English:

bufete - lawyers practice
terno - three-piece suit
lupanar - brothel
sollozo - sob
estocada - stab, thrust
tugurio - hovel
pichula - dick
azafata - stewardess
estupro - statutory rape
saña - visciousness, malice
cafiche - pimp
vagar - wander, roam
lumpen - underclass

Hopefully this will give you a necessary foundation to "get" what's going on.

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