Book Review: The Obstacles by Eloy Urroz

The Obstacles is the first novel translated into English by Mexican writer Eloy Urroz, who is one of five Mexican writers who took part in writing the Crack Manifesto--a manifesto which declares its signatories against the Latin American literary tradition of Magical Realism. The Obstacles is the story of two writers, Elias and Ricardo, who live in different towns and are writing novels about each other (and each other's city). Both writers are also searching for love, whether it be through violence, religion, abstinence, or more traditional venues.

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Latin American Literature

Interview with Eloy Urroz

Theodore McDermott: The Obstacles is, in a lot of ways, a coming-of-age story, but it’s also an incredibly ambitious—and achieved—book. How old were you when you wrote it?
Eloy Urroz: I started The Obstacles after finishing Las leyes que el amor elige (1993), my first novel. So I wrote it between ‘93 and ‘95, more or less, while I was getting my BA at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). It was first published in 1996 in Mexico and then reissued in Spain in 2002. For the second edition, I polished it a lot. I guess I was 26 or 27 years old when I first wrote it.
And yes, in a lot of ways it is a coming-of-age story. It resembles, for example, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, in that the search for love is a central theme, and—again like Flaubert’s novel, as well as Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man—one of the central rites of passage a protagonist undergoes concerns his love for a prostitute who becomes, through that love, the object of a desperate desire. The characters Federico Ross, Ricardo Urrutia, and Elias are all seeking love and not getting it. Read More

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Mexican Literature

Cesar Aira / Eloy Urroz

A review of César Aira's An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter and Eloy Urroz's The Obstacles

After the Rabelaisian movement known as El Boom in Latin American letters there came along a period of exhaustion. And revolt, too. There was, for instance, a group of authors that included the Chilean Alberto Fuguet and the Bolivian Edmundo Paz Soldán who ascribed to the generation of McOndo. Their objective was to turn Magic Realism on its head. But their novels were flat and repetitive and, in most cases, D.O.A.

Then there were the five Mexicans responsible for the "Crack Manifesto." Their aesthetic was far more ambitious: to shape a novel in Spanish unburdened by language and geography. The results were interesting, among them Jorge Volpi's "In Search of Klingsor," about the Nazis and the making of the atomic bomb. Interesting, of course, is a demeaned word: It used to mean appealing but nowadays is a synonym of all right, maybe even tolerable.

Interesting is the last adjective I would use to describe the late Roberto Bolaño, by far the most inspiring talent from south of the border since the '70s. A Chilean who lived for years in Mexico and ultimately settled near Barcelona before he died in 2003 at age 50, Bolaño's oeuvre is slowly making its way into English, in renditions by Chris Andrews, released under the aegis of New Directions. (His collection of stories, "Last Evenings on Earth," has just appeared.) His hypnotizing style and restless approach to plot are at once refreshing and humbling.

More imaginative, although also less consistent, is the astonishingly prolific Argentine César Aira, whom Bolaño once described as the type of "eccentric" whose prose, "once you start reading [it], you don't want to stop." Bolaño's portrait isn't quite accurate: Born in 1949, Aira has published almost 60 books, from criticism on Edward Lear and Alejandra Pizarnik to editions of the poetry of Osvaldo Lamborghini to a vast number of novels. In the novels I've read, like the untranslated "El congreso de literatura," about a writer's conference where one of the participants decides to clone Carlos Fuentes, the premise is better than its execution. Aira's dreams are emblematic but never unconventional. When he's in top form -- and it's seldom the case -- he can be utterly astonishing, as in "An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter," published in Spanish in 2000 and now translated into English by Andrews, too.
(...)
On the opposite end of the spectrum is "The Obstacles," a laborious novel by Eloy Urroz, one of the members who agglutinated around the Crack Manifesto. Published originally as "Las Rémoras" in 1996 and translated into English by the superb Ezra Fitz, it is a trite, self-obsessed novel-within-a-novel typical of the French Nouveau Roman.

Urroz was born in 1967. He came of age in Mexico City and spent summers in La Paz, Baja California. Infatuated by and aspiring to Xerox, at least structurally, Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Green House" -- which, oddly, is, in his view, "the best Latin American novel of the 20th century" -- Urroz has a series of narrators, all of them male, interrupting the narrative, three of them on a quest for unrequited love. Women are sheer objects of desire. The perspective shifts back and forth from Mexico's capital to the town of Las Rémoras. Unfortunately, he belongs to the school of fiction that believes in the reader's journey as a form of punishment. Suffer and ye shall be redeemed from the wretchedness of pop lit!

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An Interview with Eloy Urroz

Theodore McDermott: The Obstacles is, in a lot of ways, a coming-of-age story, but it’s also an incredibly ambitious-and achieved-book. How old were you when you wrote it?

Eloy Urroz: I started The Obstacles after finishing Las leyes que el amor elige (1993), my first novel. So I wrote it between ‘93 and ‘95, more or less, while I was getting my BA at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). It was first published in 1996 in Mexico and then reissued in Spain in 2002. For the second edition, I polished it a lot. I guess I was 26 or 27 years old when I first wrote it.

And yes, in a lot of ways it is a coming-of-age story. It resembles, for example, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, in that the search for love is a central theme, and-again like Flaubert’s novel, as well as Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man-one of the central rites of passage a protagonist undergoes concerns his love for a prostitute who becomes, through that love, the object of a desperate desire. The characters Federico Ross, Ricardo Urrutia, and Elias are all seeking love and not getting it.

TM: I ask because while the book is very close to youth thematically, it’s very mature formally and stylistically. Was this deliberate? An attempt to complicate youth and the concept of "coming-of-age," things that are often treated quite straightforwardly in literature?

EU: I don’t think it was deliberate in that sense. I’ve always loved Vargas Llosa’s The Green House. To me, it’s the best Latin American novel of the twentieth century. I’ve always been captivated by its complex structure. What I wanted in The Obstacles was to have different narrators mixing up their stories, complicating the novel’s narrative. I wanted there to be different voices, and, if possible, different styles for each voice. So each one has a different style, more or less. In total there are five narrators if you look carefully: four are young men (Ricardo, Elias, Solon, and Federico Ross), and then there’s the old priest, August Roldan.

Don Quixote’s intertwined stories and the many narrators who interrupt the main story influenced me greatly. Stylistically, Onetti was very important for me; formally, Cortázar’s Hopscotch and Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers pushed me toward that kind of innovation. But, above anything else, Don Quixote and The Green House stand out.

You can find the interview here

The Crack Manifesto

In July 1996, five Mexican novelists (Pedro Ángel Palou, Eloy Urroz, Ignacio Padilla, Ricardo Chávez Castañeda and Jorge Volpi) published "The Crack Manifesto" deciding to break the tradition of Magical Realism and return to, what they called an "aesthetic of dislocation", multiplicity and more or less deterministic chaos.

You can find these five texts: The Crack’s Fair by Pedro Ángel Palou, Crack’s Genealogy by Eloy Urroz, A Pocket Septet by Ignacio Padilla, The Risks of Form: The Structure of the Crack Novels by Ricardo Chávez Castañeda and Where Was the End of the World? by Jorge Volpi here