Nathan
Englander, The Ministry of Special Cases (Knopf)
I’m a
member of a book-swapping website, so when a book popped up that I’d never
heard of and it turned out to be about “Dirty War”-era Argentina, I was
intrigued and of course I ordered it right away – although not without a slight
feeling of trepidation, because the book was by a non-Argentine, US writer
Nathan Englander. Could a foreigner really capture the feeling of the time, I
wondered?
The
Ministry of Special Cases focuses on a dysfunctional, bleakly comic, urban Jewish
family in 1970s Buenos Aires. Kaddish Poznan earns his living desecrating
graves by night at the request of their family owners and struggles with his own
disreputable inheritance, while his wife Lillian does her boss’s job as well as
her own and, of course, the housework. When their son is abducted by the
military regime, the couple is drawn into a nightmare of bureaucracy and fear
as they struggle to get him back, or indeed hear anything of him at all.
It’s clear
from that start – at least for anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of
Argentina – that Pato is going to be disappeared, but Englander prolongs the
tension before the ultimate abduction. It’s almost painful to wait for the
fateful moment, and truly painful to read on as the Poznans attempt, in their
very different styles, to save him. I read with a pit in my stomach as Lillian
joins interminable queues and scrapes together money for bribes, as Kaddish
seeks to mine his circle of acquaintances for possible sources of news, and as
the terrible series of events nearly tears the family apart.
Kafkaesque –
too glib? Can we avoid the word? I don’t think we can, as the couple come up
against prevarication, untruths and a flurry of meaningless paperwork down
every corridor of the “Ministry of Special Cases”. The style is not strictly realistic
but the story is grounded in hard research. In Lillian, who refuses to
contemplate the idea that her son may be dead, we can see some of the founding
ideas of the Mother of the Plaza de Mayo, plus there is a guest appearance by a
pilot of the death flights (see Adolfo Scilingo). We might also recall that
Jews were disproportionately represented among the disappeared, and that there
was an anti-Semitic aspect to their torture. The plot spirals down and down the
rabbit hole into the darkness. And yet the Poznans’ unfortunate experiences
with plastic surgery add a streak of humour to the book.
My doubts
about Englander’s ability to draw us in to a novel about Argentina were
misplaced, and I was left comparing his work to that of Carlos Gamerro – both take
carefully researched stories about the country’s recent history and add a heavy
dose of fantasy, violence and black comedy. This novel can stand up against “The
Islands” and give the English-speaking reader a great deal to chew on.
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