Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas

Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rrev20 The Transentients Sergio Missana Translated by Jessica Powell Kingston, NY: McPherson & Company, 2021 Mariana Romo-Carmona To cite this article: Mariana Romo-Carmona (2023) The Transentients, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 56:2, 277-278, DOI: 10.1080/08905762.2023.2262339 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08905762.2023.2262339 Published online: 12 Dec 2023. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 5 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rrev20 Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 107, Vol. 56, No. 2, 2023, 277–278 The Transentients Sergio Missana Translated by Jessica Powell Kingston, NY: McPherson & Company, 2021 Mariana Romo-Carmona Is all writing finally about justice? Because, after all, we don’t matter beyond a grain of sand blowing in the yellow-white heat of a desert. Perhaps writers write about all the injustices we have lived, the ones we want to record to be avenged by a universe we imagine to be just. All writing is about injustice, while we ourselves are simply our own idea of justice. In Sergio Missana’s novel from 2010, The Transentients (Muertes paralelas), the desert where the sand blows is the Atacama, in the north of Chile, but the bleakness and the sense of injustice that pervade the narrative resound like in Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo; it is the ghost of the Latin American condition, the ultimate question about our existence that, for Tomás Ugarte, the protagonist, seems to be always in the subtext of his careful plans yet never explicitly stated. Whether it is a novel about deaths, or about parallel lives, it is intriguing to consider that with Jessica Powell’s neologism, suggested by her choice of title, we are pointed in the reading to the process of transentience, a kind of transference of souls, or perhaps a transcendence of life that Missana weaves seamlessly into his narrative, and it is difficult to say at what point we become enmeshed in it. Tomás is a Chilean man on the cusp of his fortieth birthday who plans, with a kind of hare-brained deliberateness, to step out of his former life and begin a completely new one, including divorcing his wife, Paula, and resigning from his well-remunerated position in advertising with a Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas ISSN 0890-5762 print/ISSN 1743-0666 online © 2023 Mariana Romo-Carmona http://www.tandfonline.com https://doi.org/10.1080/08905762.2023.2262339 278 Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas prestigious agency. Powell deftly transports a prose that sounds as stark as a report or a proposal, and we hear Tomás plan for every contingency of his transition that must take place before he actually turns forty. This careful translation exposes his obsessive punctiliousness, such as when he executes the gradual move to his bachelor apartment two weeks before the date, by signing a lease and having furniture delivered, but then not effectively moving in until the night before. But Powell also balances Missana’s exposition of these details by allowing the near tedious preparation within the plot of a novel that promises a metaphysical journey, at times heightening the tension. Before the harrowing scene of his first transference into the unhoused woman, Inés, we can locate Tomás in the well-to-do social sphere of Santiago. His breezy retelling of professional trips abroad, all without the slightest of economic concerns, portrays the kind of po-po-modern subject for whom sex, technology, and globalization constitute an unassailable reality, as solid as his family name, Ugarte. Reading from the early pages, before the announced slippage of consciousness that our protagonist will soon experience, we take a back seat to observe his performance of initiating a liaison with a young woman he meets at the gym, and wonder why on earth the attractive Fernanda would agree to bed Tomás, or whether they like each other. The heart of the novel lies not in the routine of Tomás’s life, but in his realization that he has become someone else. As Tomás speaks to us from the realm of Inés’s soul, or that of a mountaineer soon to die in an icy storm in the Andes, we are shown how the accumulation of consciousness connects the fate of all Chileans, that injustice is in the fabric of society, and at the same time, in Missana’s writing, it is the last thing that any of the characters is willing to acknowledge. From the moment that Tomás Ugarte shares with the reader his condition of intermittent states of fugue, if we are reading from an experience familiar with the Latin American canon, we must know that at least one of the following is true: one, Tomás is already dead when he begins his narration. Two, Tomás is not preparing for life after forty, presumably because he does not wish to repeat his father’s life, rather, he is preparing for death. Or, three, we are all dead and we are all scrambling in various states of fugue, slip-sliding in the twenty-first century, and unable to grasp hold of a meaning for our collective future. Mariana Romo-Carmona is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Latin American & Latin@ Studies Program at City College, New York. She is the coeditor of Cuentos: Stories By Latinas (1983), and author of Living at Night (1997; novel), Speaking Like An Immigrant (1998; stories), and Sobrevivir y otros complejos: Narrative Poems in Englillano (2011). https://linktr.ee/marianaromo_carmona