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Overview
To fulfill his PhD requirement, Camilo Fuertes decides to write about his father León, the martyred president of Tinieblas, a small country in Latin America. As Camilo traces his family’s roots, we follow León along his twisted path through delinquency, learning, lust, and bravery to his historic position of leadership.
At once a powerful vision of Latin American history and a brilliant parody of the academic form—complete with endnotes—The Dissertation is the second novel in Koster’s acclaimed Tinieblas trilogy, and an essential postmodern novel in the tradition of Vonnegut, Barth, and Nabokov.
“One of the few books of the past 20 years that deserves to be called astonishing. It is a brilliant novel, structurally a marvel and, in all, a demonstration of elan as that quality seldom is experienced in a work of fiction.” —The Des Moines Register
“Longtime Panama resident Koster portrays Latin America with a comedian’s sense of timing, a scholar’s sense of history, and a native’s fond despair.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Koster is that rare thing: a writer from the heart, passionate and uncompromising.” —John le Carré
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781468309096 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ABRAMS, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2019 |
| Series: | Tinieblas , #2 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Three Señoritas Fuertes
GENERAL ISIDRO BODEGA (1780-1848, President and Dictator of Tinieblas 1830-1848) was the first and longest-lived of our uniformed gorillocrats. Like many despots, he despised his fellow countrymen and surrounded himself with foreigners. Among the several Europeans whom he advanced out of all proportion to their merit was a French adventurer, Jean-Luc Bout de Souffle, who stole enough during three years as Minister of Culture to finance his repatriation, his retirement, and his reminiscences. These contain the earliest Fuertes reference, enveloped in some Gallic commentary en Tinieblan women.
To illustrate his thesis that "Tinieblan women display a uterine arrogance Mme. Merteuil might envy," Bout de Souffle tells of one Rosalba Fuertes, "vierge rustique et belle" who presented herself at the Presidential Palace in the spring of 1840, "her ample charms imperfectly concealed by the thin native costume," and requested an audience with General Bodega. Those charms must have worked some magic on the guards (who could not have been much more courteous than the orangutans commanded by our current simianisimo), for she was admitted; whereupon she astounded all present by informing General Bodega that she had come to the capital for the purpose of conceiving a son by him. General Bodega examined her gravely for some moments; then, announcing that he had never received a challenge he could so willingly accept or a petition he would so earnestly strive to fulfill, he ordered the salon cleared.
Bout de Souffle goes on to say that while Señorita Fuertes left the capital the next day and never again sought contact with General Bodega, the General was unable to forget her. He inquired after her and learned that she was, in fact, enceinte. The following year he sent a courier to her with his offer to recognize her son. She replied that her son was a daughter, could never hope to be President of the Republic, and might just as well keep the name Fuertes. General Bodega then sent his personal aide-de-camp to bring her to Ciudad Tinieblas, where she would have every luxury and he the leisure to give her not only a president but an archbishop and a banker as well, but she answered that, while she appreciated General Bodega's hard work and good intentions, she would never live with a military man who couldn't hit the target with his first shot. Bravisima! Bravisima, Great-Great-Great-Grandmother Rosalba!
General Epifanio Mojón (1801-1860, President and Dictator of Tinieblas 1853-1860) was an authentic hero of Hispano-American independence, cited by Bolívar himself for valor in the field at Ayacucho. He later ripened into one of the cruelest tyrants of a continent particularly rich in such, and as his hell is a burcaucracy, presently sits buttock-to-buttock with Tughlak and Caligula on an executive committee for the dissemination of terror and despair. General Mojón was sufficiently concerned about his place in history to keep a record of his principal victims, the citizens he fed to sharks and the virgins he deflowered. Here we pick up the Fuertes trace. The Gaceta Oficial for 23rd August, 1860, which records state events for the week before General Mojón was deposed and crucified on one of the posts he had set up in the bay as racks for human shark biscuits, lists one Raquel Fuertes, natural daughter of Rosalba Fuertes of Belém, La Merced Province, among the presidential bonbons.
This is the entire written record, but Theopompos Canelopulos, General Mojón's procurer, remembers Raquel Fuertes perfectly. Of the more than five hundred girls Canelopulos furnished General Mojón during six years of service, she alone volunteered.
In the last century — in fact, until the third decade of our own — Ciudad Tinieblas was effectively cut off from the interior of the republic by mountains and jungles through which one moved only on foot or horseback, and since General Mojón did not want his virgins worn out by walking or, worse, defoliated by riding, Canelopulos's procedure when farming the province of La Merced was to go by sloop to the port of Mituco de Tierra Firme, pick up a string of mules and a covered wagon, make a circuit of the chief towns — San Carlos, La Merced, Belém — and then reembark with his livestock. He enteredBelém, then, late in the evening of 29th July, 1860, in a steady downpour, the mean between our spring showers and the torrents of November, and lodged with the military chief of the plaza, a sergeant. The six girls he had rounded up en route spent the night fettered in the wagon. They were inferior both in number and in quality to General Mojón's expectations. The news of Canelopulos's presence in the province had traveled faster than his mules, and the parents of Belém had taken steps to hide their nubile daughters or disfigure them. He was due back in the capital by 1st August, and Mituco was by presidential decree exempt from his depredations. All this caused him a certain malaise: it had cost him his testicles to enter General Mojón's service and would cost him his life to fail in it. Then, as he was cursing the climate in Spanish and the general in demotic Greek, a young woman entered the sergeant's house, identified herself as Raquel Fuertes, asked Canelopulos if he was the President's pimp, and when he said yes, told him to take her with him.
Now, Canelopulos had been ordered to examine all candidates carefully, for an old Negro woman who read the future in chicken entrails had warned General Mojón that a virgin would be his downfall — a prediction which proved true, though the girl was not Raquel. And while it was strange that any girl would willingly go to General Mojón, who was physically repulsive arid mentally deranged, and who, besides, followed the practice of giving the girls to his soldiers once he was through with them, it was more than strange in the case of Raquel, who was so lovely — small but well made with firm haunches and calves; clean-featured and proud, with soft olive skin and flashing black eyes — that Canelopulos ground his teeth in grief for his lopped ballocks. So he told her his consignment was filled, and when she persisted, said she was crazy and ineligible en that account. Only when she declared that she would go to the President on her own power if he would not take her did he agree to give her a place in the wagon, and then only if she could explain to his satisfaction why she wished to go. She answered readily that she had promised her mother on her deathbed that only a President of the Republic would have her virginity. She had planned to wait for General Mojón's successor, but General Mojón had been in power for seven years, and the last military dictator had stayed in power for eighteen years, and she was nineteen already and could wait no longer.
With that the sergeant, who had been drinking white rum, stood up and said he was as much a man as any president, past, present, or future, and as far as he was concerned she needn't wait another minute, much less the three days it would take her to reach the capital and the God-knows-how-long which would pass before General Mojón got around to her, and when Canelopulos warned him that she was now state property, he said that didn't matter a donkey's prick to him and General Mojón could feed him to sharks if he cared to, but the Señorita would not be kept waiting. He made it so clear he was not joking that Canelopulos had to knock him senseless with the butt of his mule whip. He and his wagon left the same night for Mituco and sailed for the capital the next day.
Thus my Great-Great-Crandmother Raquel. If she had waited another month, we would have got the stolid bourgeois genes of Alcibiades Oruga (who revived the Constitution and founded the Liberal Party and stepped down graciously when his term was up), not General Mojón's. But then my father, León Fuertes, might have lacked some of his greatness and I my demonic drive to fabricate the past. Well done, Doña Raquel! You waited just long enough.
General Feliciano Luna (1851-1893, President of Tinieblas 18831893) was a ranch hand who turned guerrillero in 1878 when Lázaro Torcido overthrew the constitutional President of the Republic, Saturnino Aguila. By 1883, when Torcido died, Luna had collected several hundred hard riders behind him. He proclaimed himself President on 7th March, 1883, in the plaza at La Merced and was recognized by the governors of La Merced, Salinas, and Otán Provinces. He carried his capital in his saddlebags during a decade of civil war and was on his way to being considered immortal when he was lured to Ciudad Tinieblas and hanged by Monseñor Jesús Llorente (1837-1916, President of Tinieblas [by vote of the Ciudad Tinieblas Municipal Council 1883-1893).
General Luna was a decidedly cinematographic guerrillero, tall and heavily built, with huge, drooping moustaches. Strong lacings of Indian blood showed in his fiat face and violent moods. He shot his friend and lieutenant, Nicademo Lágrimas, in a quarrel over a horse, then wept like a maid at the funeral. At times insanely suspicious, he went naively to his death when Monseñor Llorente sent him a safe-conduct endorsed by the U.S. Ambassador. Though innocent of letters, he was a genius at cavalry tactics; it is doubtful that his century produced a more gifted leader of five hundred or a thousand men. He rode like a centaur and was the strongest man and surest shot in his army, an insatiable eater, drinker, and womanizer. He had fifty sons by fifty different women, all of which progeny he recognized in law, except the last, who was born posthumously. Since he did not recognize his daughters, their exact number and identity is difficult to establish, but his secretary and minister, Pantuflo Saenz, kept a log of the women he consorted with following his autoinauguration. This record states that a Señorita Rosenda Fuertes spent part of the night of 31st July-1st August, 1883, with General Luna in the Town Hall at San Francisco de Otán.
According to her own account, Rosenda Fuertes grew up in Ciudad Tinieblas, where her mother, Raquel, remained after her brief but fruitful connection with General Epifanio Mojón. Like her mother and grandmother before, her, Rosenda vowed to have herself a President of the Republic, but as Saturnino Aguila was impotent and Lázaro Torcido a pederast, she was still virginal when the latter died and Monseñor Llorente and General Luna simultaneously advanced their claims. Llorente was widely rumored to take his vows of chastity to heart, so Rosenda had no choice but to join the Governors of La Merced, Salinas, and Otán in recognizing Luna. She went after him.
Rosenda Fuertes arrived at the town of La Merced at the same time as the column of regular troops Monseñor Llorente had dispatched to capture General Luna. Luna had left thirty-six hours earlier (though the soldiers took the precaution of cannonading the defenseless town all day before entering it). Rosenda set out after her prey the same night and remained a day or twos journey behind him all through his masterly retreat along the western rim of Salinas Province and into Otán. (General Luna never, of course, allowed himself to be brought to battle but tormented the column at a hundred ambushes until its effectives were decimated, its morale dissolved, and its ordnance embedded in the mud of our summer. The opposing commander finally abandoned pursuit, satisfied his military honor by massacring a number of peasants, left a garrison at Córdoba [which Luna butchered at leisure later on in the year], and slunk back to Ciudad Tinieblas with a marvelously inventive report of the number of guerrillero bodies he had counted.) By the end of July, Luna was able to rest at San Francisco and Rosenda to catch up with him.
Their union was consummated on a thinly upholstered bench in what was normally the mayor's office and for that month the President of the Republic's. In regard for Rosenda's virginity, General Luna removed his silverspurred boots and black sombrero. She bore his weight as willingly as any mare in his corral, smiling up over his shoulder at the gas-lit ceiling fresco, which depicted Simón Mocoso, first President of Tinieblas, accepting the sash of office from the Speaker of the Constituent Assembly. She was certain, after all, that she was realizing the dream of her mother and grandmother: gets a son by a president, who would be president in his turn.
(In fact, she gave birth on 6th June, 1884, to a daughter, whom she named Rebeca. And it was Rebeca who, without the help of any president, military or civilian, constitutional or no, gave birth to not one but two presidents, León and José Fuertes. Chromosomologists will, nonetheless, take note of these recurring conjunctions of Mars and Venus and not be disturbed, when studying our family, by the genetic fallout from three presidents, all of them soldiers of sorts, and three very headstrong women.)
General Feliciano Luna spasmed, stilled, snorted, hefted his bulk off Great-Grandmother Rosenda, stepped back into his boots, put on his black sombrero, repantsed, and, buttoning, returned to the council of war which was proceeding in the outer office. Great-Grandmother Rosenda took a final smile at the fresco of Simón Mocoso, sat up, dabbed the blood from her thighs, with a corner of her skirt, and, since she had got a good, steady look at the Tinieblan Civil War while stalking General Luna, left to have the son she was convinced she carried in the one peaceful spot in the country. This was Mituco, a large island and, opposite it, a small port (mentioned above in connection with the wanderings of Theopompos Canelopulos), Hong Kongishly arranged on the Pacific coast of Tinieblas about a hundred miles northwest of the capital.
Mituco Island was not inhabited in pre-Columbian times but was consecrated as a place of ritual magic. So, at least, hints that most articulate of adelantados, Diego Masa de Vizcocho, who discovered the place in 1524 and described it in his Víajes. After prosing lyricallyon Mituco's "brisas fragrantes" and "la musica que nos serpeaba sobre sus aguas," Masa de Vizcocho complains that the island, though "naked of men" was "infested from end to end with the ghosts of sacrificial victims and the demons raised by indian mages in the practice of their abominable heresies." This blurb was, no doubt, the reason why the Spanish never colonized the island.
Sir Francis Drake passed within sight of Mituco in March, 1579, some two weeks after his celebrated fight with the treasure galleon Nuestra Señora de la Concepción or "Cacafuego". Thirty years and three months later, a former boatswain of the Golden Hind was drinking dry sack in a London tavern at the expense of a balding gentleman in black velvet. Or rather, lest I give a social cast to what was actually a business meeting, the old sailor was peddling his past, for the gentleman in black was a dealer in dreams and nightmares who (above what he simply lifted from dead authors) was wont to buy up odd tales and mixed exotica at a pint of wine the gross and then retail the best of them, refurbished, rearranged, and buffed, in his playhouse. The man was as efficient as any Chicago sausage works — a chance glimpse at a passing blackamoor had netted him the hero of one tragedy, the villain of another, and a simile for the heroine of a third — and he pumped the sailor mercilessly. The latter had already forked up a raid on Panama, the defeat of the Invincible Armada, and great chunks of the circumnavigation of the globe, when he remembered Mituco, verdant and inviting on the brass horizon of the Southern Sea. He had never set foot on the island, of course, but be had had a long, yearning gaze at it and had, besides, had Masa de Vizcocho's book read to him by a creole woman in Hispaniola when, in 1586, Drake and General Carlile seized the town of Santo Domingo, sacked it, and held it for a month. So, as he was still thirsty, he began yarning about Mituco. The dream-factor's interest perked. His eyes, which resembled nothing so much as shafts into so immensely deep and empty mine, glowed with dull light. He pulled the small gold ring in his left earlobe. "Magic?" he asked. "Did you say witches? Sweet air, and music that crept to you on the waters? A wooded isle possessed by salvage sprites? By heaven, the very spot for Prosper! though I'll move it to Bermudas. A boatswain, were you? I'll put you in it too then. But tell me more. Come, Francis Francis! Draw our brave mariner another pint!"
When God feels conscientious, He imitates good writers. Mituco, accordingly, became populated by wild men, escaped slaves who found the island a haven against recapture and who, in fact, being both numerous and determined, so roundly thrashed a series of punitive expeditions that the Spanish Governor of Tinieblas granted them autonomy. They were then tamed by a shipwrecked intellectual, a defrocked Jesuit named Cortada, who was expelled from Manila and washed up on Mituco when an Acapulco galleon, driven far off course, foundered on the Tinieblan coast. The Island of Mituco is exceedingly rich in aromatic woods, as well as mahogany, teak, and balsa, which grow in great stands, and Cortada turned the ex-slaves to commerce. Ships came from all parts of the world to load Mituco wood, and since the forests grew back as fast as they were harvested, Mituco was, by the time of independence (7th June, 1821), the most prosperous region of Tinieblas.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Dissertation"
by .
Copyright © 2013 R. M. Koster.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
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Table of Contents
Copyright,
Dedication,
Preface,
Note,
The Fuertes Genealogy,
Foreword,
Part One His Origins (1840-1917),
1. Three Señoritas Fuertes,
2. Rebeca,
3. Rebeca's Odyssey,
4. The Conception, Gestation, and Birth of León Fuertes,
Part Two His Early Life (1917-1936),
5. The Flight from Mituco,
6. The Reservation,
7. The Urchinhood of León Fuertes,
8. Learning,
9. Music,
10. Sport,
11. Love,
Part Three His Years In The Wilderness (1936-1945),
12. Some Modes of Autodegradation,
13. Journey,
14. Soldier,
15. Warrior,
16. Illumination,
Part Four His Maturity, His Ministry, His Martyrdom (1946-1964),
17. Money,
18. Marriage,
19. Lechery,
20. Politics,
21. Ministry,
22. Some Views of León, President,
23. Discord and Disfavor,
24. The Death of León Fuertes,
NOTES,
Also by R.M. Koster,
Praise for The Prince,
What People are Saying About This
"It gave me a lot of pleasure. As with Pale Fire, it's the [end]notes I cherish and will read and reread." —Anthony Burgess"One of the few books of the past 20 years that deserves to be called astonishing. It is a brilliant novel, structurally a marvel and, in all, a demonstration of elan as that quality seldom is experienced in a work of fiction." —Des Moines Sunday Register