Abrupt Mutations

by Enrique Luis Revol, Priscilla Hunter (Translator)

Abrupt Mutations leads the reader on a humorous, meandering tour of 1960s Megalopolis, at the heart of which is a hotly anticipated gathering of the city’s culturati at the home of O Jango, a Brazilian billionaire and aesthete equally revered and reviled by his fellow Megalopolitans. Parodying a number of literary styles, including the detective novel and science fiction, Revol’s novel is first and foremost a Menippean satire of the cosmopolitan west in the sixties, detailing hilariously but humanely the lives of intellectual and artistic émigré’s who have fled from dictatorships and found in their adopted city opportunities for personal freedom and pleasure they previously could never have dreamed of.

304 pages, Paperback

Published February 1, 2018

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

Such a curious, oddball novel.

We're in the swinging, hip 1960s and Kiki, a writer and poet, and his ex-wife Celia shift, shake and jive through various locations and crazy scenarios in the city of Megalopolis prior to a much anticipated blowout party hosted by Brazilian aesthete and billionaire O Jango.

Enrique Luis Revol's one and only novel (he wrote volumes of essays and poems) begins as a satire about artists and intellectuals, mostly from Latin America, who have fled dictatorships and land in Megalopolis, a world of freedom and unimaginable pleasures. But then the final third of the novel takes unexpected turns after the shocking discovery of charred human bones in garbage that came from none other than O Jango's apartment. Oh, baby! That must have been some party.

Abrupt Mutations is a highly polished literary work that shares affinities with Joyce's Ulysses and Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet while containing elements of Raymond Chandler, John Barth, Philip K. Dick, Jorge Luis Bores and Edgar Alan Poe. To provide a sampling, here are a few tasty quotes along with my brief comments:

'Will a vulgar thief, a jerk who brazenly goes through the bag of a sleeping girl, have it in him to show up and change facing a huffy, forever disdainful Julia Sierra?"

This quote is the final sentence in a charming short-story main character Kiki Minos writes entitled Missing Reality, a story inserted in the beginning pages of the novel. The theme of a missing piece in Kiki's reality is worth keeping in mind. And, yes, the way Enrique Luis performs quick shifts in perspective, in tone, even in his narrative voice, Abrupt Mutations serves as an appropriate title.

"The marcher's slogans are in many different languages, as befits the internationalism not only of these new Vandals who want to be called hippies, but also of this Megalopolis that is the most polyglot city in the world."

Megalopolis, a fictional city so international I was reminded of Jan Morris and her imagined land of Hav. My personal preference: the more languages, the more diverse the backgrounds of the denizens, the greater the city.

"infusing the happening with everlasting life ought to be the mission of every person conscious of the fact that the exhaustion of man's imaginative capacity is equal to the extinction of the human species itself."

Tell it like it is O Jango! As both an aesthetic and a billionaire, this Brazilian knows how to sling 1960s zingers to get everyone he wants to attend his party.

"At this juncture of his honest tale, the author feels a need to introduce into it a character who is entirely fictitious. Police Commissioner (Chief) Peter Plaughman, who is surrounded by a veritable swarm of individuals yanked from the most convincing reality, as will immediately be seen."

Sounds like Enrique Luis is out John Barthing John Barth here. How many levels of meta-fiction are you able to spot in this simple quote?

"Against the multiplicity of reality, fiction offers concrete, specific human lives, which are always somewhat viscous and at least a little duel. This gives it a highly appreciable advantage, namely: in fiction, experience has already been evaluated, developed, and tightly tied down so that it isn't susceptible to modification by every new possibility...fiction is always infinitely more objective than anyone's biographical experience."

So true - characters in fiction might be complex but at least they are all bound by the author's fixed words on the page.

Pick up a copy of Abrupt Mutations to find out if the Chief Police Inspector can sort through all those charred human bones. And you might be pleasantly surprised at the exceptional quality of this fine literary work.


Brazilian author Enrique Luis Revol

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Something Odd.

A friend gave me this book as a birthday gift. “Have you read him?” he asked. “Why no, I have never heard of him.” And I read the back cover and it says that “Enrique Luis Revol was a well-known Argentinian writer, critic, and translator.” I was miffed. Why had I not heard of him? Latin American books were my interest. Weird.

So I googled him and there were slim pickings. La Nation, an Argentinian paper, had commemorated the twentieth anniversary of his death in 2008. Their bio was more or less the same as the book jacket. All the others were book reviews about this very same book (this English version). Weirdly weird.

Abrupt Mutations was originally published in Spanish in 1971. Revol had died in 1988 and this English translation was published in 2018. There seems to be a whole lot missing. An abrupt mutation? More weird.

Story line.
A man, Kiki shares a cab ride with Laura, a younger woman. They are talking about other failed relations. Things aren’t looking up. A squirrel is involved. Other characters are introduced, all in some way connected, usually via sordid relationships. Stories are bandied about within the main stories. Talk of suicide, art, literature, a death, and the hardship of life. Men are typically cruel and women are typically victims. Yeah I know, rather bleak but it was written in the 60s. A literary element strings throughout the book and I have to admit that is what kept me going.

Most of the characters will attend a party thrown by the Brazilian millionaire O Jango in the city of Megalopolis. O Jango has decided to throw a potlatch where he has invited the cream of the city to watch as he burns all of his prized possessions. Why? He is fed up with the city. Wants to leave and start fresh. Why not?

As he burns his possessions, the party degenerates into an orgiastic drunk. In short, it ends on a bad note.

The Police Commissioner Peter Ploughman investigates the remains of the apartment (one really should start a fire on the upper floor of an apartment building). He finds O Jango’s book that describes who and why each guest was invited. The plot thickens!

Revol, throughout the book has a great sense of humour. What should be a depressing story is actually funny at times. This makes for great tension.

Kiki returns in the last chapter to tell a most remarkable story. He marries an anthropologist who is seeking out the mysterious Baikas people. They were French colonists who fled to Brazil to start a new life based on the Marquis de Sade. The women are beautiful, have two different coloured eyes and they bear two-headed children. A squirrel is involved. Weirder than weird.

Yes I know what you are thinking, what the hell is going on? I asked myself this a lot. Is this sci-fi, fantasy or just plain weird? Or maybe put everything together and you get an author who seems to have gone missing for many years. I am not sure this was a translation factor. And I got this book as a gift. How weird is that?

[Andrew Sare · Rating 5 out of 5]

From Pynchon-like obviation, to listomania, metafictional essaying within a noir detective sequence, to dreamscaping absurdity. Great - I love it all, especially the essaying as it was a perspective that I hadn't heard before. I suspect that the title Abrupt Mutations refers at least in part to the abrupt mutation of narrative techniques used, which is great by the way

Luis Revol explains that readers read fiction to gain knowledge and mastery over their dreams, the need for which dates back to ancient times and an ancient consciousness where ones life in dreams was very real, and therefore part of one's experience. Therefore fiction is a type of alternate/parallel consciousness! Read this before reading other works that intimidate you. A worthy addition to the Dalkey Archive.