Whoever wishes to become familiar with Venezuelan prose at the turn of the century cannot avoid exploring the work of Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez (Barquisimeto, 1967). The first thing that will call your attention is his radical heterogeneity, which includes everything from the novel to flash fiction, the novella and the short story. If we focus on his expression as a novelist, the manner in which he navigates all the genres of fiction is brought to light through his incursions into numerous subgenres, among which can be found the sentimental novel (El libro de Esther, 1999), the Bildungsroman (Una tarde con campanas, 2004), the detective novel (La ola detenida, 2017), the metafictional novel (Chulapos mambo, 2011), and, of course, all his hybrid writings, including such daring and unclassifiable verbal adventures as some recent work where he recovers ancient proto-novelistic, folkloric, and mythic languages (Roman de la isla Bararida, 2024). I am not exaggerating when I declare that we are before one of the most versatile Spanish-American authors of the start of the twenty-first century, and it must be noted, indeed, that his affiliations are wide-ranging. He emigrated to Spain in 1996 and, since 1999, with a continuous presence in that country’s publishing industry, his work has circulated, supported by a dual presence: without losing his position in the literary system of his place of origin, at this stage he is also a member of the society of letters in Spain—a situation analogous to that of the Uruguayan Cristina Peri Rossi, the Argentine Andrés Neuman, or the Peruvian Fernando Iwasaki. From that threshold, Méndez Guédez has successfully entered into aesthetic negotiations that are infrequent for other Venezuelan writers. Just like his lexicon and other idiomatic turns migrate in the same text between Latin American and European registers, depending on what the creation of the character calls for, the wanderings of his preoccupations and preferences in other areas are numerous. In addition to being one of the first Venezuelan writers to develop a diasporic sensibility related to the tragic political and social circumstances that began towards the end of the twentieth century, few of his peers have been better at making it known thanks to his combination of talent and his capacity to test out diverse spheres of reception.
In the sphere of the novel, Méndez Guédez’s contributions stand out because of their experimental nature. This claim could be surprising if the artistic experiment is limited to its avant-garde or neo-avant-garde sense, in other words, to an interruption or transgression of established codes with the consequent impression of inscrutability. Méndez Guédez’s work has never been experimental in that sense, but rather in a more subtle way and in keeping with the material circumstances of Spanish-American literature after the Boom, which was the moment when the global book market became an interlocutor for writers accustomed to interacting only with national and local markets. The last forty years have instituted a more complicated logic of production for novelists in the region, in which the ideals of autonomy have not disappeared completely, but have had to be on the defensive in order to resist the onslaught of persistent commercialism, the effect of which has been homogenization via the serialization of tastes and the consolidation of formulas. Méndez Guédez has responded to this juncture not by rejecting outright the lure of the great market, but rather by assimilating himself into it in order to be able to question it from within. His has been no easy feat; the Spanish publishing industry—since the sixties, the most influential in the Hispanic world—places numerous obstacles before the dissemination of artistic projects that deviate from the habits of the consumer. One of the strategies it employs is the rigid aid of subgenres: Méndez Guédez has accepted embracing several of these forms, but in a critical and illuminating fashion. The key to the subversion I’m alluding to lies in his sly cultivation of typological estrangement. An excellent example can be found in novels such as Briefcases from Caracas (2024), El baile de madame Kalalú (2016), and La ola detenida. Without the author having conceived of it as such, we have here a trilogy in which each piece has as an initial framework the thriller, specifically hardboiled or noir novels1; this framework, however, starts to fall apart due to the exuberant and motley addition of traditions that have nothing in common.
Briefcases from Caracas—a successful book translated into French and now into English—adds to its crime or spy elements the profiles of its protagonists, in some aspects reminiscent of the Spanish Renaissance or Baroque picaresque, whose antiheroes were never criminals despite their undeniable offenses due to the necessity of survival in a degraded society. And, concurring with the picaresque, aspects of the sentimental novel emerge, as has been common practice since the nineteenth century in Latin America, as demonstrated by Doris Sommer, with a background of community problems and their potential solutions which end up linking allegorically the destiny of the couple or of the family2. Around what community problems and couples does the plot of Briefcases from Caracas take place? Besieged by the Venezuelan disaster of the Chávez era and its criminality, Donizetti—divorced, remarried, with two kids, and two homes to support—gets involved in the shady business of transporting briefcases to different locales in Europe and the Americas by order of government officials with the aim of providing funds to allies. His friend Manuel soon cooperates with him so that Donizetti can escape this labyrinth of corruption, and Manuel himself is dealing with painful separations, only in his case it’s from a homosexual relationship. The dramatic nucleus, therefore, is the strengthening of an atypical friendship and a family outside of the usual plans, which disarticulates the outline of a foundational canonical narrative and forces us to land in a decadent orb incapable of offering reprieve. This is only obtained by way of what is personal and strictly intimate: affection as a place of salvation in the face of failed Utopias.
In El baile de madame Kalalú, the mixture of crime and picaresque is maintained, but the homage is directed towards the feminine manifestation, brought together in La pícara Justina, a novel—like the one by Méndez Guédez—that exudes an anarchic and clownish verbal humor while remaining free of moralization. Additionally, the modern writer elaborates on his admiration for the Golden Age by manipulating his expository models: if the picaresque made use of pseudo-dialogues or of a fictious communicative circle in which a narrator in the first person speaks to a mute interlocutor whose position we adopt, when the international art thief Emma Sáez—or whatever her name is, she’s addicted to masks—relates her robberies, she does so to a nun in a coma and in a Portuguese psychiatric institution. When Emma declares, towards the end, that she’s escaping in order to return to the Caribbean, she suggests that the nun will accompany her: beyond the mentally ill woman’s possible maelstrom of illusory scenarios, the emphatic autocracy of the novel cancels out our demand for verisimilitude. What triumphs is the act of narration, almost materialized for our contemplation and very far from the routines of commercial fiction.
With respect to La ola detenida, the demolition of the parameters of the crime novel is just as unprecedented. The Venezuelan detective Magdalena Yaracuy, who lives in Europe, accepts the mission of returning to Caracas to find a Spanish politician’s daughter mixed up in some business in which double agents, gangs, officials of the Chávez regime, and other thugs converge. A plot such as this would satisfy someone who is solely eager to consume a “thrilling” anecdote like the one promised on the dustjacket of the original edition from HarperCollins. However, on a less friendly plane for the masses, the novelist undermines the premises of the product entrusted to the market, crossbreeding it with another product in vogue after the Boom: magical realism. With the peculiarity that Méndez Guédez takes it back to its pre-mercantile origins. Let’s recall the way in which, in 1948, Uslar Pietri translated Franz Roh’s concept into the domain of Venezuelan letters, when Uslar highlighted a “treatment of humankind as a mystery amidst realist facts3.” In the long run, he even made reference to a literature representative of the popular soul where “good and evil battle with magical formulas4.” This is precisely what happens in the story of Magdalena Yaracuy, a believer in María Lionza, a Venezuelan telluric goddess, a synthesis of European, Indigenous, and African myths: religiosity decisively contributes to outlining the psychological profile of the protagonist and prevents us from categorizing her within the caricature of the traditional detective. From our perspective, her extravagant feats hang from a string of faith, revealing her to us as a being torn between the longed-for return to her native homeland submerged in a well of criminal darkness and the yearning for the homeland of her childhood in touch with a spiritualized natural world.
My brief comments about these three novels don’t aim to exhaust what could be said about Méndez Guédez. If in the enormous diversity of his prose I emphasize attacks on the industrialized sites of the thriller, it’s because they evince the Cervantine core of his poetics, willing to renovate the fossilized inclinations of the public masses with an exercise in creation by way of destruction. Almost alchemical, the method consists of three principal components: significant doses of pastiche, a sense of humor that is at times carnivalesque, and a great closeness to what in English is known as new sincerity. Given that the first two elements should be obvious because of what has been pointed out up until now, to conclude I will add a few words about the third. There’s a lot in the novels, as well as in the short stories by Méndez Guédez, of the emotional spontaneity vindicated by David Foster Wallace a number of years ago when he made public a rejection of the chronic irony of postmodernists from the U.S.—consider John Barth, Donald Barthelme, or Thomas Pynchon—their intellectual ambivalences, and, above all, their fear of embracing with respect and conviction “plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions,” simple, aged, and out-of-fashion human conflicts and emotions5. In the case of the Venezuelan writer, the spontaneity is doubled, since nothing indicates the intention of promoting the artist as a heroic figure who would rise up as the “next real literary rebel,” as Wallace called it—in a slanted self-portrait—someone who would have the courage to break with the cerebral horizon of postmodernism. The meticulous examination of the sentimental in a good part of the prose that concerns us hardly resembles professional duels or indirect reactions to them: it arises out of an urgency, from an immediacy that perhaps can only be attributed to an attachment to Venezuela, a country in which the parallel illusions of the petroleum boom and democratic soundness have fallen apart, starting in the eighties, with heartrending consequences. I’m not ignorant of the fact that the new Venezuelan sincerity has its roots in the stories and novels of Francisco Massiani and the poetry of Eugenio Montejo6, but it seems similarly indisputable to me that the return to a certain emotional transparency in El libro de Esther, Una tarde con campanas, Briefcases from Caracas, La ola detenida, and Roman de la isla Bararida is nourished by the collective heartaches that have loomed more distinctly each time. And the same thing could be asserted about the work of other exceptional, contemporary Venezuelan authors. However, Méndez Guédez is one of the most visible names in a literary movement of enormous richness and vitality that is entirely deserving of greater coverage.
1 Encompassed by Spanish publishing advertisements with the simple label of “noir novel.” In the English language, within the spectrum of the crime novel, the hardboiled novel is usually distinguished by a resolution that is somewhat partial to the ethical question that is posed by the crime committed; in contrast to the noir novel, with a pessimistic point of view, in which good is not separate from evil and in the end is almost an illusion. See Annie Adams, “A Conversation with Megan Abbott,” The Sewanee Review, summer, 2018.
2 Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions, Berkeley: University of California, 1991.
3 Arturo Uslar Pietri, Obras selectas, Madrid-Caracas: Edime, 1956, p. 1071.
4 Ib., p. 1215.
5 David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13:2, 1993, pp. 151-194.
6 Montejo, in an essay in El taller blanco (1983), almost outlines a manifesto: “Learning to feel: this sole attempt, which is nothing small, would better shape the young poet than all the learning sought after through literary knowledge, the rules, the movements” (Obra completa, A. López Ortega, M. Gomes, and G. Yáñez Vicentini, eds., Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2022, vol. II, p. 413).
Translated by Luis Guzmán Valerio
