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Vlady Kociancich: La octava maravilla (The EighthWonder)
Our hero/narrator is Alberto Paradella. By profession he is a lawyer, though, as we shall see, he will change profession during the course of the book. He is married but his wife has left him and is living with somebody else. They will eventually divorce. but for now they are not on good terms.
He did well as a boy/young man. He was academically successful but also did well at sports. When that didn’t work out, he became the chess champion of school. When his friend Paco introduced him to his girlfriend, Victoria, within a very short time she had rapidly changed her affections to him. As we saw above they married and they separated.
He initially thought of being a doctor and inevitably did that field. At his graduation party. He decides to play a joke. The phrase. I am writing seems to be a buzz word in his circle for politely saying go away. Don’t bother me. Accordingly he uses it here and announces that he is going to be a writer. Only at the end does he meekly mention this will be a sideline from being a lawyer. Instead of somewhat annoying his parents and others they are all very happy. he is going to be both a novelist and a lawyer. He is a disrupter but at the same time he wants it easy. have a single ambition, Victoria. To say, like Ulysses, that my name is Nobody and begin with a happy ending. To never leave Ithaca, to save myself the battles and journeys.
But there are other things happening. On more than one occasion he has strange visions. The first one, for example, is when he is still living with his parents he suddenly seems to be in a strange city looking out from the balcony in the freezing cold late at night he will have other strange visions.
At the beginning of the book, we find that he has left the legal profession and is now a journalist specialising in tourism. Also at the beginning of the book he acquires Alice Martinez. He had seen her at the station. Not for the first time, he is not sure why he is there. Nevertheless she accosts him by his house and he invites her in. She is the least Alicia Martínez you could imagine.
However, before we get any further there we go back to his marriage which, of course, we know has broken up. Victoria, his wife, was interested that he was going to write, a novel as well as carry on in the legal profession but the reality is that when he is not working in the law office he is writing a novel and she is, a very. bored. Eventually, after some considerable time he decides that he needs to provide entertainment for her. Soon the house is filled with beautiful people, which seems to keep both of them entertained.
Things are not going too well with Victoria and, indeed, with his life in general. He is struggling with the novel and at the same time use translating Conrad into Spanish. He gets on well with his friend.Paco and visits him to tell him of his woes and it is Paco who persuades him to change profession and become a travel journalist which he does. This does nothing for his marriage.
Throughout the book we have had hints of things going on in Berlin, he will have been involved in a script that does not work out. Eventually we find him going to a conference. Initially, even while en route he is planning to go both toPaestum and Berlin but soon realises that he cannot do both and decide to go toPaestum. However, he ends up in Berlin. The Berlin episode is perhaps the highlight of the book. It is very funny and moves the plot along in quite unexpected ways at least because in a small Italian restaurant he meets not one but two people who will have an influence on his life. However, perhaps not surprisingly, he doesn’t quite make the conference.
The two key people he meets at the restaurant are Alicia whom we have briefly met and who will pop up in Buenos Aires and also a man planning to make a film called The Life and Work of Francisco Uriaga. Uriaga is an obscure Nicaraguan poet who quite likely does not exist. Why does he agree to do the script? What I wanted was to tell the story of a poor human creature stripped of personal history, rootless and reimplanted in a world that he doesn’t attempt to comprehend, hounded by the futile interpretations of others. Perhaps he identifies withUriaga.
It gets more complicated. We know from the beginning of the film will come out but his name does not appear in the list of credits and he is naturally upset. things are getting more and more mysterious we jump forward and backwards in time, indeed, in place as he seems to gallivant around Europe including Moscow, somehow ends up in Berlin where the place where he wrote the script seems to have disappeared.
So we have a young man who on the face of it looks as though he will succeed as he does well academically and in sports and even wins the school chess championship and gets the prettiest girl. He is going to be a successful lawyer and a successful lovers indeed, like the author herself, he even translate Conrad into Spanish but somehow it goes wrong and we are not entirely clear how and why as clearly strange things happen. Is this magic realism or fantasy or the influence of Borges whom the author knew well? Part of the fun of this book is that we don’t really know and indeed we don’t really know which of these things actually happened or which come from his fertile , and on one occasion his febrile imagination.
If, like me, you enjoy a book where at times you’re not entirely sure what is going on and it is quite likely that the characters themselves are not sure either, you will certainly enjoy this book.
Publishing history
First published in Spanish in 1982 by Alianza
First published in English by in 2026 by Seven Stories
Translated byJessica Sequeira