the most disturbing book and the beauty of disturbances

This month LibraryThing provoked me with its monthly newsletter. It contained a link to an ongoing discussion topic (months-long): “What is the most disturbing book you’ve ever read?” (If like me, you find library cataloging software and sites lacking, you might want to look at LibraryThing which offers a version for running small libraries. For a control freak like myself, who also needs much more data than a site like Goodreads can provide, this has been a godsend.)

When I read that question, I immediately thought of One Day of Life by Manlio Argueta. I read this book in the first half of my 30’s; it came as part of a four-volume set of Latin America writers from Quality Paperback Books. I enjoyed them, great works all: 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa; Dora, Doralina by Rachel de Queiroz. But the fourth one, One Day of Life by Argueta haunted me then and haunts me whenever I think about it, and that’s more often than you would think despite its detailing the lead up to the El Salvador Civil War in the 1980’s and despite the fact I never re-read it.

The book’s matter-of-fact, simple prose details horrors the same way any war-zone child would. It just happens. It is what has happened. It is their life. Though it covers a single “day of life”, the flashbacks offer more detail, all of it disturbing. This was the time of the death squads where people were tortured and executed at the hands of faceless men.

[SPOILER COMING UP]

Though I haven’t read the book since the mid-1980’s, it’s seared into my brain. All I had to do was read this synopsis of the end of the novel, about the central character, Guadalupe Guardado and the novel came back to life. Guardado’s granddaughter, involved in the protests of the time, is Adolfina:

At the end of the novel, the authorities bring a beaten man to Guadalupe and Adolfina who had said the name “Adolfina” after being severely beaten. Adolfina does not recognize the man, but Guadalupe recognizes her husband José. On his previous advice, she denies knowing him, and he is taken away.

Wikipedia entry “One Day of Life”

There’s a horrific beauty contained in vessels such as this which exquisitely contain the pain, the despair, the sadness, the very twisted ways of life which the mainstream hopes to avoid. Argueta’s novel reminds me of another version of the same thing, a song by Rubén Blades, “In Salvador” on the album Nothing But the Truth released in 1988. (I’m unable to find a YouTube video of the song although you can watch a “complete album” video of the album. It’s the 7th song.) Although Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, and Sting contributed songwriting efforts to this album (Blades’ first in English), this song is not one of those. Critics have knocked the fact that Blades sings with an over-enunciated English but to me, it makes the album more honest. We’re hearing his description of what life is still like in El Salvador, and we’re hearing someone from Central America (Blades is Panamanian) speak to us. We wouldn’t expect to hear someone speak fluid English when it’s a second language. The refrain:

“No one can protect your life in Salvador. Judges that condemn you have no name. Could it be the gentleman who lives next door? Or the guy who goes with you to work?

transcribed from the album Nothing But The Truth

There are several other disturbing songs on the album in varying degrees. “The Hit” describes how a young Hispanic male violates the main law of the street that “you don’t double-cross the ones you love”. He’s gunned down. “Letters to the Vatican” describes a woman who’s lost a good chunk of her mind, but finds support in the bar scene where the patrons remember how she was “before she got this way”. In “Ollie’s Doo Wop” Blades sings about the cultivated ignorance of Ronald Reagan to Ollie North’s nefarious doings. I get a very personal meaning from “Hope’s On Hold” where Blades sings of all the things that inhibit falling in love, which leads to “hope’s on hold”.

If we go into the beauty of ugliness, of disturbance, I would offer up Lou Reed’s Berlin which has a semi-rock opera construction. It’s about speed freaks living in Berlin. You can imagine the seaminess of it.

Raw emotions of any type remain more true to me than than the equivocal nature of living in polite society. For this reason, I rarely tell anyone, even my wife, what is going on inside my head. As a creative, we entertain the un-entertainable, the unappreciated, the unapproved. We shed the mundane memories which frankly hamper our movement in polite society. We accept all, winnow it, and feed it back to our world, hoping that if we do it in a meaningful manner, it will illuminate rather than obscure.

Read Argueta’s book. It remains pertinent because the horror merely moved to different countries. It’s the same visceral, hateful viciousness which fuels America’s cultural and political battles. It blossoms in central Africa, in Singapore, in India, in the Europe. It sustains all ideologues on right and left.

Or if you need the short course: listen to Rubén Blades’s song.