Not A River, shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize 2024, is the final novel in a trilogy about masculinity by Argentinian writer Selva Almada, following on from Brickmakers and The Wind That Lays Waste. The International Booker Prize recognises the skill of both writer and translator by dividing the prize equally between them, and we see the skills of both working together from the start here. The novel opens with a powerful image of three men fishing. They’re in the final moments of landing a huge ray, Enero at first glimpse dominant in this struggle, standing firm on the boat, stocky and beardless, swollen-bellied, legs astride, his physical presence reflected in those short staccato syllables. The masculine narrative voice is there straightaway with El Negro alongside the boat, water up to his balls, extending to the landscape—those hard consonants and dull vowels of the river, pancake flat.
Enero and El Negro, both now fifty-something, have come to the island on a camping and fishing trip, with a younger man, Tilo, the son of their old friend, Eusebio. They hang up the now dead ray on a branch, like an old blanket hanging in the shade .The narrative switches between all three of them, remembering past trips as they crack open the beers. We’re reminded that though familiar with the island, they’re not from there. When El Negro ventures into the woods for kindling, he inadvertently treads on a twig and the noise is deafening….. announcing the presence of an intruder. Their outsider status is underlined further when local man Aguirre turns up with his gang. Seeing the dead ray, he initiates a little rivalrous sparring about how many bullets it takes to kill one, before lighting up slowly and taking position proprietorially on the shore.
Interleaved with the story of the fishing trip are flashbacks, recollections from all three men, that give us some insight into their past. We learn that Enero, El Negro and Eusebio were friends from boyhood, spending long days by the dam, lazing around under the trees, fishing, chatting, reading comics, flicking through the magazines full of naked women and crimes stories. There are scenes from their young adulthood too, their antics now featuring heavy drinking and casual sex. Its consequences are part of their story, when Eusebio tells his mates that he’s having a kid with Diana, when Enero sends the girl he’s knocked up to have an abortion, she miserable and ashamed, Enero utterly indifferent.
After some early foreshadowing, the details of Eusebio’s accident are revealed, and the narration opens up to give us the response of Diana and young Tilo to the tragedy. There’s also a shift in the narration that conveys a sort of whole community response to the tragedy:
Ask around and anyone will remember Eusebio’s accident. The first stirrings: sounds like someone’s gone missing, there’s a search on. Then the panic: what if it was this person or that, plenty of folks were out fishing that weekend, it was a national holiday, the beginning of summer, word was the fish were frolicking in the river like butterflies.
This community, this group response, is echoed elsewhere in the book, when the three main protagonists are identified as a group rather than individuals: their close embrace while drunkenly dancing, their names all beginning with E, the not entirely clear account of who had Delia for a mother, who was brought up by his sisters—I had to reread passages to get this straight. And then there’s the layout of the dialogue on the page, the speaker always coming after what’s said:
Christ, she’s ugly!
Says Enero, slapping his thigh and laughing. The others laugh as well.
Fought us pretty hard.
Says El Negro.
as if any of them could be saying it, as if they’re almost interchangeable. And women, for these men, are interchangeable too. El Negro’s sisters, long hair, tall and slender as herons—even he couldn’t tell them apart.
The women enter the narrative some way in, around the time we learn of Eusebio’s accident. There’s Diana Maciel, who returned to the island to take over her father’s hotel when he died, and her best friend Marisa, Tilo’s godmother. There’s Siomara, horribly beaten by her father when she was a girl, now prone to lighting fires as a way of dealing with her anger. There are two young women, Mariela and Lucy, aged 15 and 16, who turn up at César’s bar on the island and catch the lustful eye of Enero having a beer with Tilo. Things get very sleazy when they start having a flirtatious banter, given that Enero must be old enough to be their father.
From this point, time frames seem to break down. It becomes harder to separate the fishing trip in the main narrative from different incidents in the past. Connections between characters are not immediately apparent and boundaries between the living and the dead are fudged. This seems of a piece with the superstition that’s part of life in this community: Enero has had a scary recurrent dream since childhood of The Drowner, his face pressing against the child’s, the soft grey flesh, cheeks eaten away by the fish so you could see the line of molars.It’s so disturbing that the boys seek help from Gutiérrez, the healer, to ask what it all means.
There’s some wonderful language in this book, and I loved the concision of the imagery: Enero’s feet are plump as empanadas, his mother frail as a leaf in her final days. I admired the clever plotting in the interweaving of the narrative strands. But I did find the misogyny and sexualisation of very young women hard to read. There’s a scene where Mariela is taken to Santa Fé by her uncle to buy a new dress, and all eyes are on her, looking at her with desire, at her uncle with envy. A colleague of Enero’s in a different town in the north was seeing a girl who could’ve been his daughter and she was pregnant with his second kid. I found myself clinging on to the female characters who were in any shape or form resisting the pattern of early sex followed by pregnancy: Gutiérrez’ wife telling Enero sharply to get the snip if you don’t want kids, that girl he abandoned, who then left for Buenos Aires, me, the reader, hoping she’d get some qualifications and a decent job. I realise, of course, that the novel is a critique of misogyny, but I could have done with just a few more signs that things don’t have to be this way. The novel is a very fine account of male bonding and behaviour in a poor rural community, but the misogynistic attitude towards women left a bitter aftertaste for me.
Many thanks to Charco Press for the review copy.
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