The Armies by Evelio Rosero. Translated from Spanish by Anne McLean, 224 pages, New Directions, $14.95

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

At the beginning of Evelio Rosero’s novel “The Armies”, the protagonist, Ismael, a retired professor in his seventies, spies on his young neighbor Geraldina over the wall between their properties. Geraldina enjoys walking around her yard naked, knowingly teasing Ismael. “I ask nothing more of life than this possibility,” Ismael thinks, “to see this woman without her knowing that I’m looking at her, to see this woman when she knows I’m looking, but to see her: my only explanation for staying alive.”

It’s a typical statement from the typical creation of a typical older male novelist. Perhaps from reading too much Marquez and Roth, I thought I could pretty well predict where the story was going: Ismael would eventually conquer the beautiful woman, body and soul, and there would be an extended (and slightly nauseating) sex scene. That instead the book would end with mass murder and necrophilia never crossed my mind. Disturbing political novels ought to carry a warning label.

Evelio Rosero has been writing about the miseries of his native Colombia for three decades now. His novels, many of which take on the internecine wars, kidnappings, murders, and political upheavals of his country, have won numerous awards (including, humorously enough, the National Literature Prize from the Colombian Ministry of Culture). His work is notorious for being brutally realistic, even hyperrealistic, and “The Armies” is no exception.

To highlight the horror, the novel begins with a brief idyll. The setting is San José, a small town somewhere in Colombia. For a few pages, we enjoy Ismael’s thwarted lust, his wife Otilia’s resigned patience with his wandering eye, and the pleasures of small town life. But darkness quickly seeps in. There is an invasion of soldiers, guerrillas or paramilitaries of some sort, and the police charged with protecting San Jose are no better than the invaders. Soon, Otilia has been kidnapped, along with Geraldina’s husband and children.

What we are given to understand is that this is only the latest in a long string of attacks. Most of San Jose’s residents have lost loved ones, either to violence, or to the threat of violence. There are almost no young people left in San Jose:

“They’ve all gone in this past year.”
“All of them?”
“All the girls and all the boys, Is mael.” She gave me a reproachful look. “The most sensible thing they could do.”
“It won’t be any better elsewhere.”
“They had to leave to find out.”

“The Armies” doesn’t have much by way of a plot; another attack begins soon after the first one, and it is still going on when the novel ends. But in spite of all the terror, Rosero manages to get in some beautiful writing (aided in no small part by his translator from the Spanish, Anne McLean). A grenade is “an animal with jaws of fire that will dissolve me in a breath”. Dawn “descends from the mountaintop like fluttering sheets”. Best of all is the ways in which Rosero connects sex and death, as when Ismael watches Geraldina in her misery:.

“I proceed behind Geraldina, trying in vain not to recognize her besieging scent, my eyes involuntarily exploring her black-clad back, and catching a glimpse, beneath the mourning, of her legs, her sandals, the radiant movement of her body, her whole life diffusing and proclaiming, beneath the veils of fatality she is suffering in this world, the perhaps inclement desire to be possessed as soon as possible, albeit by death (by me?), to forget the world for one moment, albeit for death.”

There is also plenty of time left over to wonder at the inanity of war, and this war in particular. We are told very little about who or what the armies are fighting for, aside from the fact that San José represents a “strategic location”, and is surrounded by thousands of hectares of coca.

Instead of a lot of political explanation and historical background, we get anecdotes. The chief of San José’s police force has a mental breakdown and kills a handful of civilians, then is promoted to work in another city. A bomb-sniffing dog is buried with military honors while men lie rotting in the streets. When Ismael is told that his name is on a list of collaborators to be killed, he laughs, “Why do they ask for names? They kill whoever [sic] they please, no matter what their names might be. I would like to know what is written on the paper with the names, that ‘list’. It is a blank sheet of paper, for God’s sake. A paper where all the names they want can fit.”

Colombian author Evelio Rosero: He explores the inanity of war.

The only thing that can really be said against Rosero’s novel is either irrelevant or a deal breaker: it isn’t particularly fun to read. When the darkness falls over Ismael, it is never to rise again. Nothing is so bad that it can’t get worse. The manager of a local café receives the index fingers of his kidnapped wife and daughter in order to extract a higher ransom. The city’s empanada vendor’s severed head is found in his grease boiler. One woman watches her son die, then is killed and raped (in that order) by a group of soldiers.

What we’re supposed to take away from all this brutality is unclear, and the moments of light are so few and far between that they seem almost rote when they arrive. Near the end of the book, Ismael sits with Geraldina, and his trembling hand falls on her knee. Old habits die hard, apparently.

“It is the emotion, Geraldina. Or it is my lechery, as Otilia would say.”
“Don’t worry, profesor. Stick with love. Love conquers lechery.”

That may be so, but the armies in San José are fighting for neither love nor lechery. They are fighting for greed, which it seems nothing can conquer.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins, and this is The World.  Forty years ago, the space race ended when American astronauts walked on the moon.  The race between the United States and what was then the Soviet Union obsessed both countries, and cost tens of billions of dollars and rubles.  The space race was portrayed as a competition to prove whether communism or capitalism was superior.  And, as Jessica Golloher reports from Moscow, Russians, at least still some of them, still smart from the contest.

JESSICA GOLLOHER: Russia’s state run TV network, Vesti acknowledged the climax of the two decade-long space race showing pictures of Neil Armstrong, walking on the moon, planting an American flag and saluting. The package commemorating the landing was the fourth story broadcast.  But the channel did not miss the chance to feature current and former Soviet cosmonauts and space experts, recalling Russia’s glory days that began in 1958 with Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the earth. Sergei Krikalev, head of the cosmonauts training center seconded the mood at a press conference today, again acknowledging the moon landing.  But touting Russia as number one in space firsts.

SERGEI KRIKALEV (TRANSLATOR): Sure, we would have wished a Soviet, a Russian person to be the first on the Moon, but life is life and at some point we succeeded in being ahead of the Americans by launching the first satellite, putting the first man and the first woman into space and the first space walk. We had many accomplishments.

GOLLOHER: And there was some belittling of the Americans. Another state run channel, Rossiya, last week devoted time in a report on the Apollo Landing to listing conspiracy theories that the landing was faked. For example, the program said that many people found it strange that Neil Armstrong had kept a low profile since his walk on the moon. State run English channel, Russia Today, addressed those allegations by running an interview with space analyst Yuri Krash.

YURI KRASH: Well it’s widely regarded that the man on the moon was there 40 years ago.  There have been, nevertheless been allegations that the United Sates moon landings were actually faked.  What do you think of about that, can those allegations really be true?

EXPERT: Not at all, absolutely not.  All those allegations are absolutely baseless.

GOLLOHER: It’s unclear whether the average Russian believes the landing was a product of special effects. And it’s also unclear whether Russia wants to restart the space race. Yuri Salnikov is a space historian.

YURI SALNIKOV (TRANSLATOR): The military space race will continue, no doubt about it, but despite its negative traits, it has a lot of benefits, namely dual-use technologies and dual-use ideas. All these can be used for a future Mars project.

GOLLOHER: Russia has recently talked about a manned mission to mars, although official say it could take 20 years to get off the ground. For The World, I’m Jessica Golloher in Moscow.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JESSICA GOLLOHER: In 1969, Roald Sagdeev was working as a nuclear physicist in the Soviet Union.  He went on to become the Director of the Soviet Space Institute.  Roald Sagdeev, do you remember what your reaction was to the news that America had successfully put a man on the moon?

ROALD SAGDEEV: Oh, yes absolutely.  Yes, I was well aware of existing lunar competition and it was obvious that Apollo made sure that Russians lost the space leader crown.

GOLLOHER: And so was that a source of either anger or resentment, or upset for you?

SAGDEEV: I think, as many other Soviets, we had mixed feelings.  There was some sadness to know that we were not anymore space leaders.  But I think at the same time I think overwhelming feeling that Armstrong and all the steps down on the moon surface was on behalf of all of us too.  On behalf of all the humankind.

GOLLOHER: It is hard to believe the Soviet government saw this as a giant leap for mankind.

SAGDEEV: You know now, I am talking about people, not about the government.  Of course the government had to swallow all these feelings of defeat.  But, at least they did not prevent the people in the country to see what the Americans did resemble.

GOLLOHER: And, after that happened, did that change the Russian space program at all?

SAGDEEV: What actually happened, the government finally admitted their defeat and the decision was to not to try to send anyone to the moon.  Not to build a base on the moon, but to concentrate on something where at the Americans are not doing much.  The focus of the campaign to man in the orbit for longer and for longer periods.  Little Soviet orbital stations, later called Salyut.  And finally cumulated in orbital station Mir,  which survived Soviet Union and works for a number of years carrying luck of Russian configuration.

GOLLOHER: The Mir space station and giving way to eventually what we have now a national space station.

SAGDEEV: Yes, and it actually gave a chance to Russians to become very valuable players in international space station now.

GOLLOHER: That is very interesting.  So you are saying that many years later because the United States put a man on the moon first, Russia took a different direction which we can even see today.

SAGDEEV: I would paraphrase it; in following the Americans defeating Soviets.  So what kind of trophies are they good for this kind of victory?  Now they have as a trophy a chance to use Soviet rocket and lead a crew to an international space station which would be very crucial for NASA in a couple of years from now when shuttle trip will be retired.

GOLLOHER: Using the Soviet space rocket?

SAGDEEV: Yes absolutely.

GOLLOHER: Are you saying the Soviets won after all?

SAGDEEV: No.  I am saying Soviets found a more ecological niche in the space activity and it finally serves Russia now.  So Russia is a very valuable member of the international space exploration.

GOLLOHER: Let me ask you this.  You have come a long way since your days in the Soviet Union and you held a very high position there but now you are working for NASA.  Can you tell us exactly what you are doing there?

SAGDEEV: About 8 months ago NASA launched a spacecraft which is orbiting the moon at a very low altitude and this unmanned spacecraft called “Lunar reconnaissance orbiting” sending a lot of interesting sighting data, and I am here to look for the traces of water in permanent shadow of craters in the polar areas of the moon.

GOLLOHER: Since you were the former Director of the Space Institute, did you think you would ever be working with NASA?

SAGDEEV: You know if someone 25 years ago that I would find myself in the future in a completely different place.  Not in Russia.  My reaction would have been in America never, on Mars maybe.

GOLLOHER: On Mars maybe.  Well you may have a chance of course because we are hearing now that Russia may want to put a man on Mars.  Do you think that could happen?

SAGDEEV: I think that is absolute science fiction.  There are some enthusiasts who are talking about Mars, but nobody would take them seriously.

GOLLOHER: That is Roald Sagdeev who is a Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland.  He once was the Director of the Soviet Space Institute.  He is right now at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California looking at photos for evidence that there is frozen ice in craters on the moon. For The World, I’m Jessica Golloher

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.