Colombian noir
Writing in praise of the movie “Casablanca,” Umberto Eco once claimed, “two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us.” Whereas one or two lonely banalities come off as lame, a whole stampede of them can inspire: “just as the height of pain may encounter sensual pleasure, and the height of perversion border on mystical energy, so too the height of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the sublime.”
I believe Eco is right, and, moreover, this represents the best that can be said about Santiago Gamboa’s new novel, “Return to the Dark Valley.” This is a book replete with cliches — the naive young woman corrupted in Catholic school, the middle-aged man lured into a mystery by a sexy woman, the mad preacher who is either insane or a prophet — and at their best these cliches collide with an energy that yields true literary entertainment. The question is whether Gamboa’s novel ever becomes more than the sum of its banalities.
The Colombian has achieved something of a reputation in the United States, with his prior novels “Necropolis” and “Night Prayers” winning a dedicated cult following. Reviewers have quite generously compared his work to the likes of Thomas Mann and Roberto Bolaño. One can see why they might be tempted to make such comparisons: Like Bolaño, Gamboa loves to create intense narrators whose dark, politically inflected stories trade heavily in noir tropes; and like Mann, Gamboa is a novelist of ideas who drags in history and philosophy to make big statements about the contemporary world.
At more than 400 pages, and combining plot threads from present-day Madrid, Colombia, and Argentina, not to mention Rimbaud’s France, “Return to the Dark Valley” does not lack for ambition. Throw in an Islamic State-inspired hostage crisis, references to heady material like Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” and Stephen Hawking’s cosmology, a biography of one of the key modernist poets, and lots of world history, and you have a big, sprawling novel that is all but begging to be a stateof-the-world think piece fueled by a peculiarly Colombian intelligence.
Gamboa has clear talent. His retelling of Rimbaud’s life successfully captures the historical ironies of the great poet’s story, and it makes a worthwhile counterpoint to his novel’s investigation of the ongoing struggle for the soul of the 21st century. In addition, Gamboa possesses considerable talent at creating energetic scenes that spiral off in intriguing directions. Unfortunately, too much of “Return to the Dark Valley” is cookie-cutter plotting with prose worthy of a first draft. Even though Gamboa travels across nations and eras, the writing is largely uniform throughout, squashing a diversity of characters, locations and viewpoints into a kind of literary slurry that leaves everyone and everything covered in the same texture. Gamboa provides enough place names and details to convince me that he has spent large amounts of time in Buenos Aires, Madrid and Bogotá, but he never gives the sense that any of these places are idiosyncratic locations with their own rhythms, histories, desires, trajectories and destinies. (Even Colombia’s own Bogotá and Cali, which one would image to play to Gamboa’s strengths, come out as flat.) Likewise, the characters are each carefully allotted their own personal details, but they fail to resolve into interesting individuals with any life of their own.
A second critique is that although Gamboa gives his novel a dizzying broadness, everything in here is only an inch or two deep. The aspirations are clearly grand: Gamboa means to put the political failures and successes of Latin America in conversation with the North/South struggle currently tearing apart Europe and the United States, plus say a thing or two about literary genius. The problem is that the author’s level of analysis rarely goes beyond name-checking, maybe tossing in a fact or two. Further, his characters fail to accumulate enough depth or gravitas to represent the historical forces that he tries to align them with. The aspirations may be toward “The Magic Mountain,” but the result feels more like a Power Point presentation.
Gamboa is often grouped with the practitioners of Latin American noir, and if you stack “Return to the Dark Valley” against the median genre fiction, it certainly more than holds its own. I don’t mean this as a slight, but it is a critique, for I feel that Gamboa wants much more than to write successful noir — I believe he aspires to push the genre’s tropes into the high literary realm occupied by the likes of Georges Simenon, Patrick Modiano, Roberto Bolaño and, yes, “Casablanca.” On that count, “Return to the Dark Valley” makes a worthy attempt, but it’s ultimately too many cliches, not enough transcendence.
Scott Esposito is the editor in chief for the Quarterly Conversation, an online periodical of book reviews and essays, and the author of “The Doubles.” Email: books@sfchronicle.com