The Past by Alan Pauls

Sophie Ratcliffe reviews Alan Pauls' The Past.

We first meet the hero of Alan Pauls's novel fresh out of the shower. He's standing on the pavement, groin covered by a hand towel, trying to sign for a recorded delivery letter. It's an uncomfortable position, but, by the standards of this novel, a relatively clean one.

Set in Argentina, and translated from the Spanish, The Past follows Rimini, a thirtysomething translator, who spends most of his time masturbating and snorting coke. His addiction, we learn, is a way of facing the void left after the end of his relationship with a volatile blonde, Sofia, who does something involving therapy.

Rimini and Sofia had been inseparable for 12 years. Now they've parted, Sofia seems in need of some counselling herself. She spends her time writing long parenthetical letters to Rimini, recovering from nose-jobs, and stalking him in a yellow plastic mac.

Pauls's account of the two ex-lovers lies somewhere between Fatal Attraction and À la recherche du temps perdu, and their tempestuous relationship offers a good arena for some gnomic abstractions, along the lines of "every love has its beginning … but this by definition is a lost moment" or "every lover is the tardy inheritor of an instant of love they never see".

Halfway through, the novel changes pace, and switches into a cod-biography of a gay artist called Jeremy Riltse whose work had been admired by both Rimini and Sofia. Riltse, the founder of the "Sick Art" movement, had specialised in paintings consisting of real body-parts (called things like "Plaque", "Glans" and "Herpes"), with a sideline in canine gangbangs. He committed suicide shortly after the culmination of his career - a series of pierced canvases entitled "Bogus Hole" achieved during a night of passion with a well-endowed stranger.

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Argentine Literature

Alan Pauls - The Past

Ben Bollig reviews Alan Pauls' The Past.

The past, Alan Pauls' first novel to be translated into English, has arrived with a certain amount of fanfare - including a film adaptation starring Gael Garcia Bernal, an appearance at the Edinburgh Festival and critical comparisons to Proust and Nabokov.

Like Proust's epic, The Past is about memory. A twentysomething Buenos Aires couple, Rimini and Sofia, split up after 12 years together, sharing out friends, possessions and living arrangements. But there is a sticking point: their photographs. Sofia wants desperately to divide up the thousand-plus photos they have; Rimini feels repulsed by the pictures. For Sofia, the images are a visual prompt to aid her perfect memory of their years together; for Rimini, they moor him in the past.

Rimini moves on: a new, younger girlfriend, cocaine abuse, work addiction (he is the most productive of multilingual translators) and compulsive masturbation. He marries and divorces, breaks down and recovers. He even becomes a tennis coach. Sofia, meanwhile, haunts him with recollections at pivotal moments in his life. By the final section of the novel she has become the founder member of a remarkable organisation: the Women Who Love Too Much.

A large proportion of the text digresses from this main narrative: the life and works of a fictional painter and pioneer of 'Sick Art', Jeremy Riltse (one of his pieces involves an attempt to have part of his rectum removed and attached to canvas); the tale of the adman who brings Riltse's 'Bogus Hole' to Buenos Aires; the story of the obsessive lover Adele Hugo; the tragic fate of Rimini's junior-school teacher. After about 400 pages, the novel is even good enough to recap an earlier sequence, presumably fearing that the portrayal of amnesia may have brought it on in the reader.

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Argentine Literature