Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email


2021 November 17 • Wednesday

Here's a book I expected to like more than I did: Rafael Bernal's The Mongolian Conspiracy.

Sometimes when people recommend a book to me that's, like, literature, I have to tell them, somewhat sheepishly, that it's really hard for me to read a book that isn't about bank robbers or monsters from outer space and like that.

So The Mongolian Conspiracy should have been just fine. It's about a thug and a killer who works for the police in Mexico City, the third act of his life, following a brutal childhood and coming of age learning the coarse arts of killing during the Mexican Revolution.

The story of the book concerns this man, Filiberto García, as he's asked to cooperate with both a Soviet and an American agent to investigate and prevent a conspiracy to assassinate the president of the United States or the president of Mexico or both.

So far, so good. But nothing much actually happens in this book. The book is mostly told in the first person and García's internal monologue is frequently amusing but also somewhat monotonous. He tends to say and think the same things in the same over and over. Bernal slides between first and third person narration with admirable elegance and this is an unusual and pleasing maneuver to find in a novel, but there doesn't seem to be much point to it.

There doesn't have to be, of course, but there doesn't seem to be much point to anything else.

One of the blurbs on the back of the book describes it as "The best fucking novel ever written about Mexico City", but this seems unlikely to me, as I didn't get much impression of Mexico City at all and the action of the book seems like it could be easily relocated to any city with a coffeeshop and a bar.

There is, of course, a love interest thrown in here as well, which is, like the other strands of plot, curiously static and undeveloped. It also plods down the road to a predictable and trite conclusion.

The introduction to this edition describes the love story as "one of the most moving and unlikely in Mexican literature—and, without a doubt, the saddest". If this is true, it doesn't say much for Mexican literature.

Perhaps I just didn't understand what this book was supposed to do and how it was supposed to do it. It didn't come into focus for me and it was never exciting or more than mildly interesting. García was a character with potential to be like a Mexican Continental Op but the writing and the ideas never come close to Hammett's level.

Of course, this is also a novel I read in translation. While I'm always interested to read books from other places and times, English translation doesn't always capture the sensuality or just plain greatness of a work's original language. The English prose here seemed good enough, not stilted or clunky in any way, but maybe there are nuances in Spanish that aren't observable here.

The first line is "At six o'clock in the evening he got up from bed and put on his shoes and a tie".