Literary Games : “Los Vivos y los Muertos” by Edmundo Paz Soldán

By Kavinika

As tomorrow is La Noche del Libro in Madrid, I’ve been reflecting on my role as a reader. The act of reading for me is a sublime pleasure, one born out of my love of riddles and tendency to uncover secrets. Friends say I’m a terrible reader because I have the habit of skipping to the end of every novel before I even get half way through it. I do finish the work, but I can’t help jumping around from part to part, testing myself to see what I’ve figured out along the way. I relish the challenge of solving the riddle, even before its solution is placed before me. I desire to decode each secret before it’s revealed, perhaps to see how “clever” I am.

I am presently reading a friend’s manuscript, a soon-to-be published novel titled “Los Vivos y los Muertos” by Edmundo Paz Soldán. The act of reading the manuscript is a privilege, a secret in itself, one that I will uncover before most others. I’ve yet to finish, but if it holds up, it will be his best work to date. Pained, paranoid and fearful characters mark the body of his fiction, but this novel is different. As in previous works where there was distance between the characters’ experiences and the reader, in this novel, the pain can be touched. The sense of loss is everywhere. Children die; a husband feels that he is the cause of his family’s sadness and thus abandons them; a wife leaves her husband for another man; friends must try to make meaning out a senseless world when classmates are raped and murdered. The story resonates with me because it is loosely based on events that happened in a city near where I live. Paz Soldán uses the deceased daughter of one of my friends as the basis for a character in the novel. It is, in essence, very personal, perhaps too personal.

The emptiness in “Los Vivos y los Muertos” belongs to the characters, but also to me. Too long I had been fearful of loss, and that fear changed me, as loss itself changes each of the characters. I find myself, once again, skipping around in this novel, realizing that the act of reading, the search for answers, is, ultimately, a search for one’s self. The riddles in literature are no different really than the riddles of life. When we love a work, even if it’s seemingly different from our own experiences, it is because it appeals to a personal longing, a daydream, or a fear.

The secret to be uncovered in “Los Vivos y los Muertos” is implicit, more of a question really. The answer lies within the reader, for I am forced to ask myself how to make sense of what I once had, what I will never have again, and how I contributed to its end. The only way to answer such a question is to take responsibility for one’s own role, to forgive one’s self, and to accept that we are all human, prone to making mistakes, for even when we have the best of intentions or tremendous potential, we cannot control the actions of others, and sometimes it is hard to control ourselves.

I hope that Paz Soldán found a part of himself while writing this novel, as I have uncovered a secret part of me within it.*

*Originally published in the blog titled "The World of Kavinika" Article called :
Literary Games. Monday, April 21, 2008