The novel ‘El cielo visible’, winner of the National Prize of Uruguay

Diego Recoba: the contradictions of the Latin American writer
The novel ‘El cielo visible’, winner of the National Prize of Uruguay, shows the complex context of literary creation
El cielo visible (Random House), by Diego Recoba (Montevideo, 1981), is an interesting book. Not everyone will like it. Some may even come to dislike it quite a bit. In any case, it contributes something objectively valuable. In 2015, the Penguin Random House group created the series Mapa de las Lenguas to spread among Spanish readers Latin American authors little known outside their countries. Since then it has helped us realize that our language is written in many tones. This one by Recoba is one of them, quite common in Latin America.

Let's say it quickly and clearly to save time for those who do not want to participate. El cielo visible proposes the typical discourse of the Latin American left, Rioplatense version, derived from Uruguay. In this first urgent notice, the reader should know that this involves a fairly conventional list of criticisms of capitalism and imperialism, complaints about job insecurity and an aesthetic of “resistance” to hierarchies with appeals to a self-satisfied quixotism. All with a rhetoric that is quite worn out at this point, although sometimes fantasy spreads its wings to ease the reading a little.

This is a reality that exists. And it has a fairly powerful resonance among a certain intellectual elite. You may agree or not, but it is worth taking a look at. That said, Recoba’s work offers something more: its contradictions are so obvious that they expose the insides from which a careful look could bring out a more detailed analysis of what is happening beyond our noses.

Recoba describes in detail the poverty of his surroundings, but he cannot stand being labeled as “the poor writer of Nuevo París [his neighborhood],” and invited to “tables, festivals and meetings to talk about poverty and marginality.” He criticises capitalism and the post-colonialist structure, but accepts a scholarship from “one of the few European institutions that are still interested in the Latin American poor.” He denies the oppression of the big publishing industry, but is published by its largest multinational. He despises writers obsessed with awards, but El cielo visible has just received the National Literature Award from his country… a fact that the multinational uses as a selling point for the book. Logically.

All of this appears in the book… and, in an interview with THE OBJECTIVE, he confirms it. He not only recognises all the contradictions, but calls it literature. “The book fulfils what I had proposed, something like without a theme, if you will, or without a structured and fixed content. Basically, it is a book about the construction of a family history by an author who happens to have the same name as me; I like to play with that because people think I am talking about myself, and sometimes I am not really talking about it. And, on the other hand, there is a reflection on what it means to be an artist, and to be a writer, at least in Uruguay».
Truth and fantasy

The visible sky begins with the commission of the Intendencia (City Hall) of Montevideo to Diego Recoba to write the history of his neighborhood, the humble Nuevo París. The real story, rather flat, leads to a fantasy with impossible theme parks in the glorious era of the early twentieth century (fat cows here exaggerated to the point of parody), an underground world in the style of Sábato... In parallel, the literature of the self emerges: the poor writer who only wants to be allowed to live reasonably well working in what he likes and seeks Italian nationality to escape to the prosperous Europe that he so despises; The bureaucratic hell that this implies is resolved in a new flight of fantasy: the genealogical investigation leads to a plot of ancient secret societies halfway between Umberto Eco and Dan Brown, with the Uruguayan genocide as its central motif, and the dream of becoming the archetypal Uruguayan intellectual in exile leads him to imagine the recovery of a forgotten artist, Myrtha Passeggi, who developed her career in the real Paris in the second half of the 20th century.

«In my books there are always journeys and movements. Lost characters and searching are very present in the history of countries like Uruguay», Recoba explains in the interview. «And I am very interested in exacerbated fiction: one thing triggering another, without limits, to see how far it takes me». This mixture of literature of the self and fantasy is not new, but those who use it usually specify at some point (even if it is in a note at the end of the book) what is based on real facts and what is pure imagination or, at least, a simple hypothesis. «I cancel the distinction between what is true or not, what happened or not. I try to generate a state of permanent and growing confusion in the book from an accumulation of data and names and situations so that, at a certain moment, the reader finds it absurd to go around comparing, because the reading would become endless, and enters into a kind of stupor in which that claim to truth is invalidated».
It sounds very seductive from the author's point of view. But, in exchange, the reader is being deprived of a fundamental critical tool. «I'm not worried, and maybe I'm selfish in that, but I see the truth in art differently. It can be due to a certain honesty or a certain narrative stance, but not due to the contribution of verifiable or credible data. And I think that this has been strengthened in recent decades. My ideal reader doesn't have Google open».

Unfortunately (from that perspective), journalistic interviews tend to go in another direction. You can ask Recoba the author, for example, if he shares that rather conventional block of progressive thought of Recoba the character. «There are things that I don't identify with now, and I think that's great: it means that the character's preaching was fixed there for a question of role, but I've already moved on, I'm a little further away from what I was at the beginning of that character».

And you can make a kind of epilogue tracing the current situation of Recoba the author. He no longer lives in the humble Montevideo neighborhood called Nueva París, but in the Paris of his life, the European one, where he is studying a master's degree in Contemporary Art at the University of Paris VIII. The visible sky continues to haunt him: "One of its characteristics is that there are always loose ends, threads to follow. And some things still call to me. That does not imply returning to the universe of El cielo visible, but rather following certain searches and processes related to that mix between family history and sociopolitical history of Uruguay. Although I will also integrate what I am doing here, which will appear more and more, because I let it get in."
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