THE LISBON SYNDROME
EDUARDO SÁNCHEZ RUGELES (tr. Paul Filev)
Turtle Point Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now
Rating: 4.25* of five
The Publisher Says: A sudden catastrophe in Europe exposes the slow-motion destruction of a generation of Venezuelans and their struggle against repression.
In The Lisbon Syndrome, a disaster annihilates Portugal's capital. In Caracas, Lisbon's sister city and home to many thousands of Portuguese, few details filter through the censored state media.
Fernando runs a theater program for young people in Caracas, teaching and performing classics like Macbeth and Mother Courage. His benefactor, Old Moreira, is a childless Portuguese immigrant who recalls the Lisbon of his youth. Fernando's students suffer from what they begin to call "the Lisbon syndrome," an acute awareness that there are no possibilities left for them in a country devastated by a murderous, criminal regime. A series of confrontations between demonstrators and government forces draw the students and their teacher toward danger. One disappears into the state secret prisons where dissidents are tortured. The arts center that was their sanctuary is attacked, and Fernando is pulled into the battle in the streets.
The Lisbon Syndrome is the most trenchant contemporary novel to offer a glimpse of life and death in Venezuela. But Sánchez Rugeles's bleak vision is lightened by his wry humor, and by characters who show us the humanity behind stark headlines.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: The Lisbon Syndrome, in this novel, is defined as "...knowing that the things we love are finite, knowing that there is no tomorrow, knowing that we won’t have enough time to do anything worthwhile, that we will disappear without leaving any kind of mark, because we don’t matter to anyone, because our existence has no relevance." It sounds like a variation on saudade to my old-white-guy ears...but the key to the novel is this sense of existential irrelevance.
It's hard not to see the Syndrome all over the post-January 6th world. It's amazing to me how Author Sánchez Rugeles built this sense of the fruitlessness of expecting change to come and simultaneously supporting the acts of making the world however much better you can where you are, using what you have. A schoolteacher whose wife leaves him in the midst of the awful disasters that follow an asteroid obliterating Lisbon uses drama, à la Station Eleven, to instill humanistic values in...anyone, everyone, especially young anyones. It's exactly what one would expect from a somewhat ineffectual intellectual. It makes a positive difference, too. And that draws attention from the Powers That Be—never a good thing. There is, at the end of Author Sánchez Rugeles's rainbow, a pot of fool's gold guarded by a troop of evil sidhe. Yet the point, the salient characteristic, of this story is Hope. Big, capital-H Hope, the kind that comes from recognizing that yes, it's hopeless, people are bastards and the ruling class is scum, but Sra. Gomez needs help with her garden and little Pepita needs eyeglasses so get it in gear and fix the small things.
Brutal world events and brutal governmental responses to them make this a sometimes disheartening read. "How much more can a human endure?!" I asked myself more than once in these seven chapters. The truth is: A lot more. The novel's inspiration was the astonishingly awful year, 2017, when the Venezuelans threw themselves a constitutional crisis and an acceleration of the protests ongoing since 2014. This explainer will give you some context, if you're curious, but the simple truth is that Author Sánchez Rugeles is fictionalizing, not reportage-ing.
I'm pretty sure a lot of you are staring at the screen wondering if I've lost my mind recommending this read to wobbly weary North Americans in the midst of an unfolding crisis of our own. Permaybehaps. But I'm not doing so in the "eat-your-spinach" Savonarola-of-storytelling mode. I think Translator Paul Filev has done an extraordinarily good job of making this Spanish-to-English story clearly and succinctly Author Sánchez Rugeles's story while imbuing it with English-language prosody of clarity, compactness, and elegance. The subverbal vocalizations of the lines are rhythmic and the sounds of the words used are poetic in the best sense of the word.
Why, when the novel's set in Caracas, is the title The Lisbon Syndrome, and why is the catastrophe that has changed the city set in Lisbon? I'm speculating when I say this, but to me, the sizable Portuguese community in Caracas and its reason for being...Portugal's long, tortuous fascist dictatorship resulting in lots of exiles, which was ended by a revolution that caused chaos and produced more emigrants...gave the author his loud echoes of modern Venezuela and its convulsions.
While it's possible that your battle-weary eyes might not get aimed at such a dark corner of our literary world, I'm here to say I hope you'll visit Author Sánchez Rugeles's "believe me, bad as it is, it could be worse!" story universe. He's done post-apocalyptic fiction right.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
UPGRADE
BLAKE CROUCH
Ballantine Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$30.00 hardcover, available now
Rating: 4* of five
One of Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2022
The Publisher Says: “You are the next step in human evolution.”
At first, Logan Ramsay isn’t sure if anything’s different. He just feels a little . . . sharper. Better able to concentrate. Better at multitasking. Reading a bit faster, memorizing better, needing less sleep.
But before long, he can’t deny it: Something’s happening to his brain. To his body. He’s starting to see the world, and those around him—even those he loves most—in whole new ways.
The truth is, Logan’s genome has been hacked. And there’s a reason he’s been targeted for this upgrade. A reason that goes back decades to the darkest part of his past, and a horrific family legacy.
Worse still, what’s happening to him is just the first step in a much larger plan, one that will inflict the same changes on humanity at large—at a terrifying cost.
Because of his new abilities, Logan’s the one person in the world capable of stopping what’s been set in motion. But to have a chance at winning this war, he’ll have to become something other than himself. Maybe even something other than human.
And even as he’s fighting, he can’t help wondering: what if humanity’s only hope for a future really does lie in engineering our own evolution?
Intimate in scale yet epic in scope, Upgrade is an intricately plotted, lightning-fast tale that charts one man’s thrilling transformation, even as it asks us to ponder the limits of our humanity—and our boundless potential.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: I loved Dark Matter. I really, really liked Summer Frost. I was lukewarm about Recursion, to my distress. And now I'm conflicted about Upgrade. It's a good story, one I liked reading. But it's very dependent on your being willing to listen to medical-terminology-laden lectures to get the full impact of.
That isn't an easy ask. Genetics is a field where the Acronym Anteater sends his tongue into overdrive, clawing down mound after mound of random alphanumeric snippets and that incredibly long, sticky tongue smooshing them into a lumpy paste of confusing same-but-different ever-shifting compounds. I got lost multiple times.
But the work I put in looking stuff up and the time I spent reading whatever "for Dummies"-level materials I could kept me grounded in Author Crouch's not-distant future of humans suffering for the hubris of a few visionary souls. It's important thought-experiment material, all of it, and Author Crouch doesn't think we should wobble blindly on our unicycles down a cobblestone alleyway when we could, and should, think and talk about what can and what might should not be done to our bodies.
I know it sounds like I am trying to foist an "eat-your-spinach" book onto you this time. I promise that I am not. What I am asking each and every one of the book's potential readers to do is to be ready to think about how a man whose hubristic scientist mother was his idol, his exemplary scientist-in-service to humanity, would reach the conclusions and decisions he does when he learns he's been used as a genetic experiment...like the one that got her reviled.
When he grasps that his continued existence has been rendered debatable by the unauthorized, illegal actions of people with an agenda that he will serve, whether dead or alive.
He's no longer himself, husband-father-government agent of law enforcement. He is An Example, a Test Case, a now-capital-lettered being without any say in the matter, and the matter is life and death for us all.
Those stakes got your interest? They got, and kept, mine. Up, in fact, until 4am they kept mine.
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