Below the Surface
Rodrigo Fuentes, trans. Ellen Jones, Trout, Belly Up
Charco Press, 100pp, £8.99, ISBN 9781916465619
reviewed by Jessie Spivey
The short story suffers the reputation of lightness. Readers often view them as writer’s way of cutting their teeth, or else as an easy introduction to their larger body of work; the less assiduous treat them like a pick n’ mix, praising and cherishing some stories and overlooking others. Trout, Belly Up, by Guatemalan author Rodrigo Fuentes, is a poor candidate for such lackadaisical approaches. Shortlisted for the 2018 Gabriel García Márquez Short Story prize – the most important Latin American award for ‘cuentos’ – the collection masterfully toys with the conventions of its genre.
Throughout, the book is like a nightmare hard to shake off upon waking: lifelike, violent, unsettling and unresolved. In place of the satisfaction of loose ends neatly tied, we are left with strange and vivid motifs imprinted in our mind. A coquettish cow balanced on her hind legs, facing a gang of gunmen; an aeroplane suspended in a turbulent sky; a mysterious creature in a dark sewer; a tank of trout turning upon each other.
However fantastic his imagery, the world Fuentes evokes in this slender volume smacks of brutal reality. These interconnected narratives offer a harsh portrait of life in rural Guatemala. Today the majority of Guatemalan farmland remains in the hands of a small and powerful elite, and smallholders cannot rely on a coherent system of property rights to protect them from the aggressive expansion of the palm and sugarcane companies. Thirty-six-years of civil war and genocide against indigenous peoples weigh heavy, and there has been little progress towards justice. In these stories, people who have lived through terrible things recount events in a matter-of-fact tone, voicing loss with dry stoicism and the curt verdict, ‘That’s life.’
The logic of the parable yields here in face of more arbitrary fate, epitomised in the maxim, ‘fortunes can change, even if no-one gets any richer.’ This force is in evidence from the first story in the collection, where we are introduced to Don Henrik with his dream of starting a trout farm on the mountainside. A man with a ‘Viking voice,’ great stature, and great plans – a foreigner, perhaps – Don Henrik reappears through in the collection, and might initially seem immune to the catastrophes that loom. Yet there is a scepticism in the voice of this first story’s protagonist as he watches him present the rainbow trout, and claim that it would bring progress to the mountain:
The trout seem more like a microcosm of the community around them then a saving grace. They move in circles around their tank, ‘swimming anti-clockwise, all together like a big happy family’. In the confined environment, they are dependent on the oxygen fed to them through tubes and are said to have a savage nature that is manifested when the order is broken. If a fish breaks free from the group, a violent reaction ensues:
This disquieting episode is a foretaste of the stories that follow, where unexpected acts disturb imposed systems (‘Out Of The Blue, Perla’, ‘Dive’), and peace turns quickly to violence (‘Ubaldo’s Island’). It also hints at the subtle complexity of form in Fuentes’ stories, which complicates any straightforward interpretation.
We progress through the stories and patterns start to emerge, revealing a dark underlining to the flippant. In ‘Dive’, Don Henrik recounts the inexplicable, drug-driven stunts of his younger brother Mati, who decorates the old ceiba tree with all of the family’s shoes. Their father ‘stayed there, contemplating the tree, trying to decipher some meaning in the decorations’ before turning to Henrik to say, ‘well doesn’t look half bad, does it?’ In the final story of the collection, simply titled ‘Henrik’, it is their father’s body that is found on his cardamom farm, hanging from the branch of a ceiba, following a collapse in crop prices. What does this parallel mean? Is it just another of life’s strange and ironic moments that lodges in the memory, like the incoherent note left at the foot of the tree?
As patterns form, they also break apart, reminding us of the pitfalls of attempting to abstract conclusions from them. Fuentes’ cliffhangers are open-ended. People vanish and resurface unexpectedly, inevitably none the richer, and family bonds run deep, offering the possibility of a saving grace in a topography of hardship. These stories are mostly told by strangers, and give the feel of eyewitness testimony – with exception of ‘Whiskey’, the almost cinematic tale of a lost dog at the book’s centre. Ellen Jones’s translation sensitively renders the subtle shifts of inflection in Fuentes’ writing as it moves from voice to voice, communicating charged scenes through deceptively commonplace prose. The immense weight of castoff phrases gives these stories their extraordinary scope, and it is a feat to have preserved the effect so faithfully in English.
As his life and livelihood comes crashing around his ears, the narrator of the first story waits for the boss, Don Henrik, to arrive, and wishes, like a child in a fable gone wrong, for everything to ‘go back to how it was before’. In the last story, it is Don Henrik who is waiting to face his unfortunate fate:
This past February, a proposal was made to grant amnesty to perpetrators of crimes against humanity committed during the 36 years of Guatemala’s civil war. This was a blow for a country which, in 2013, was the first to convict a former leader of genocide, and resulted in the freeing of convicts, the shelving of ongoing trials, and moves to silence human rights groups. Fuentes’s stories resonate against this turbulent political landscape, drawing our ears close to the voices of the most vulnerable and the least heard.
Throughout, the book is like a nightmare hard to shake off upon waking: lifelike, violent, unsettling and unresolved. In place of the satisfaction of loose ends neatly tied, we are left with strange and vivid motifs imprinted in our mind. A coquettish cow balanced on her hind legs, facing a gang of gunmen; an aeroplane suspended in a turbulent sky; a mysterious creature in a dark sewer; a tank of trout turning upon each other.
However fantastic his imagery, the world Fuentes evokes in this slender volume smacks of brutal reality. These interconnected narratives offer a harsh portrait of life in rural Guatemala. Today the majority of Guatemalan farmland remains in the hands of a small and powerful elite, and smallholders cannot rely on a coherent system of property rights to protect them from the aggressive expansion of the palm and sugarcane companies. Thirty-six-years of civil war and genocide against indigenous peoples weigh heavy, and there has been little progress towards justice. In these stories, people who have lived through terrible things recount events in a matter-of-fact tone, voicing loss with dry stoicism and the curt verdict, ‘That’s life.’
The logic of the parable yields here in face of more arbitrary fate, epitomised in the maxim, ‘fortunes can change, even if no-one gets any richer.’ This force is in evidence from the first story in the collection, where we are introduced to Don Henrik with his dream of starting a trout farm on the mountainside. A man with a ‘Viking voice,’ great stature, and great plans – a foreigner, perhaps – Don Henrik reappears through in the collection, and might initially seem immune to the catastrophes that loom. Yet there is a scepticism in the voice of this first story’s protagonist as he watches him present the rainbow trout, and claim that it would bring progress to the mountain:
‘He turned the creature over, as though wanting the sun to catch all its hidden colours, but in truth it just looked like any old fish.’
The trout seem more like a microcosm of the community around them then a saving grace. They move in circles around their tank, ‘swimming anti-clockwise, all together like a big happy family’. In the confined environment, they are dependent on the oxygen fed to them through tubes and are said to have a savage nature that is manifested when the order is broken. If a fish breaks free from the group, a violent reaction ensues:
‘The water was churning, looked like it was boiling, and the surface filled with the metallic flashes of a knife fight. A minute later everything had calmed down. The big family was once again swimming anti-clockwise. There was no sign of the trout that went belly up.’
This disquieting episode is a foretaste of the stories that follow, where unexpected acts disturb imposed systems (‘Out Of The Blue, Perla’, ‘Dive’), and peace turns quickly to violence (‘Ubaldo’s Island’). It also hints at the subtle complexity of form in Fuentes’ stories, which complicates any straightforward interpretation.
We progress through the stories and patterns start to emerge, revealing a dark underlining to the flippant. In ‘Dive’, Don Henrik recounts the inexplicable, drug-driven stunts of his younger brother Mati, who decorates the old ceiba tree with all of the family’s shoes. Their father ‘stayed there, contemplating the tree, trying to decipher some meaning in the decorations’ before turning to Henrik to say, ‘well doesn’t look half bad, does it?’ In the final story of the collection, simply titled ‘Henrik’, it is their father’s body that is found on his cardamom farm, hanging from the branch of a ceiba, following a collapse in crop prices. What does this parallel mean? Is it just another of life’s strange and ironic moments that lodges in the memory, like the incoherent note left at the foot of the tree?
As patterns form, they also break apart, reminding us of the pitfalls of attempting to abstract conclusions from them. Fuentes’ cliffhangers are open-ended. People vanish and resurface unexpectedly, inevitably none the richer, and family bonds run deep, offering the possibility of a saving grace in a topography of hardship. These stories are mostly told by strangers, and give the feel of eyewitness testimony – with exception of ‘Whiskey’, the almost cinematic tale of a lost dog at the book’s centre. Ellen Jones’s translation sensitively renders the subtle shifts of inflection in Fuentes’ writing as it moves from voice to voice, communicating charged scenes through deceptively commonplace prose. The immense weight of castoff phrases gives these stories their extraordinary scope, and it is a feat to have preserved the effect so faithfully in English.
As his life and livelihood comes crashing around his ears, the narrator of the first story waits for the boss, Don Henrik, to arrive, and wishes, like a child in a fable gone wrong, for everything to ‘go back to how it was before’. In the last story, it is Don Henrik who is waiting to face his unfortunate fate:
‘. . . he sits down again, cigarette in one hand and rum in the other, and says something about life and its twists and turns and its cartwheels, mainly its cartwheels, the cartwheels are when everything goes to shit, he says, and then he is very still, the smoke from his cigarette rising silkily from between his fingers.’
This past February, a proposal was made to grant amnesty to perpetrators of crimes against humanity committed during the 36 years of Guatemala’s civil war. This was a blow for a country which, in 2013, was the first to convict a former leader of genocide, and resulted in the freeing of convicts, the shelving of ongoing trials, and moves to silence human rights groups. Fuentes’s stories resonate against this turbulent political landscape, drawing our ears close to the voices of the most vulnerable and the least heard.