This week’s novel portrays issues that have become all too familiar in recent weeks: long lines and shortages at grocery stores, ruthless price gouging, and grim acts of violence. As timely as such topics may be in the era of COVID-19, Elizabeth Bryer’s translation of Karina Sainz Borgo’s It Would Be Night in Caracas turns to Venezuela, where an unfolding economic crisis has transformed daily life into a fight for survival. One of the first works of fiction to emerge about Venezuela’s current calamity, It Would Be Night in Caracas compels us to ask: What does it take to survive in a world where law, order, and social cooperation are in dangerously short supply?
As Anne Applebaum’s Atlantic article noted last month, Venezuela has long served as convenient straw man for various political agendas in the developed world. It Would Be Night in Caracas renders the conceptual real through the dilemma of Adelaida, burying her mother in the midst of rampant chaos and corruption. Since she lived alone with her mother, any tenuous connection to community seems lost. Another death, this time of an old friend and neighbor, may give her the means to escape Venezuela. While reading this novel, I was struck by how it chronicles a journey from language and thought to action and how it handles complex historical and political circumstances.
The novel opens as Adelaida stands graveside at her mother’s burial, grappling at once with personal loss and the hellscape that surrounds her. The first university graduate in her family, her mother once taught “private tutorials” for students, obsessively “outlin[ing] the basics: subject, verb, and predicate…” At first, Adelaida emphasizes language in her approach to widespread scarcity: “We could only watch as everything we needed vanished… ‘Lose’ became a leveling verb, and the Sons of the Revolution wielded it against us.” But when dealing with paramilitaries, protesters, or looters, this type of linguistic currency holds little sway. Her apartment, once a safe haven of books and her mother’s memory, is overtaken by a female gang. Tellingly, their ring leader destroys a volume of poetry, assuring Adelaida that the only word that matters is “hun-ger” as she knocks her out with a gun. Survival means traveling light, discarding sentimental or intellectual baggage along the way.
What does this journey from ideas to action signify? Because the plot involves mistaken identity, NPR describes it as The Talented Mr. Ripley without the thriller elements. But a closer (if older) corollary is Greek tragedy, Antigone refusing to abandon her brother’s body. Similar to The Remainder, a disconnect between the living and the dead drives conflict, but Adelaida has neither friends nor the luxury of defiance. When she breaks into the apartment of her neighbor, Aurora Peralta, and finds her dead, taking over her space is the only option. She crosses paths with Santiago, the younger brother of a close friend, but she cannot save him. “Santiago could be anything: a martyr, a killer, an informant…I realized I was utterly alone.” In a world of murky motives and ruthlessness, her survival leaves no room for memory or past ties. Instead, her future lies in Aurora’s closet, where she finds a Spanish passport application.
This perspective could be grim, but instead, it’s a compelling slow burn that reveals the measures to which we resort when a sense of community is no longer possible. Some reviewers took issue with the lack of political context, yet that raises an intriguing question: To what extent must the novelist serve as historian? In contrast to some abstract playground of geopolitics, this depiction of Venezuela plays upon the nerves rather than the brain. As Adelaida contemplates leaving, she looks out at Caracas and observes how “electric currents of misery and beauty were shooting through the city.” In these troubled times, this terrifying and explosive city offers a cautionary tale about the consequences of unchecked selfishness and greed.
Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas, trans. Elizabeth Bryer (HarperVia, 2019)
Photo Credit: Car burning during 2014 Venezuelan protests via Alamy.
