'The Sorias' by Alberto Laiseca: Total War

The book discussed in this text you are now reading is unparalleled. It is because everything surrounding 'Los Sorias' is pure legend. Alberto Laiseca (Rosario, Argentina, 1941-Buenos Aires, 2016) is legendary, having become the secretive author of a cult work spanning over 1,300 pages that took 10 years to write, and whose manuscript was almost stolen while at a train station: imagine what it would have meant for the author to lose it and what it would have meant for literature—not only Argentine literature—to never have seen a book like this come to light.

His first editor, Gastón Gallo (somewhat crazier than Laiseca), who wanted to publish it knowing it had to be manually transcribed since there was no digital file, is legendary. His first print run—of 350 copies signed by the author—at Simurg Publishing is legendary. And legendary is the group of readers who praised it when it was still unpublished: Rodolfo Fogwill, César Aira, and Ricardo Piglia, who wrote a prologue titled 'La civilización Laiseca' that this edition by Barrett includes (thanks to the good work of its editors—and no less reckless—Belén García, Manuel Burraco, and Zacarías Lara).

The manuscript was almost stolen while at a train station: imagine what it would have meant for the author to lose it and what it would have meant for literature

Piglia's text set the tone for subsequent readings of Laiseca's work. Piglia stated that 'Los Sorias' is "the best novel written in Argentina since 'Los siete locos'" by Roberto Arlt. He knew well that the line of Argentine tradition it followed was not the canonical one, of Jorge Luis Borges, but the unusual one, of Ernesto Sábato, Macedonio Fernández, and Arlt.

Now we could add a few more novels, not many indeed: 'The Demons' by Heimito von Doderer, 'Troiacord' by Miquel de Palol, 'Solenoid' by Mircea Cărtărescu, 'The Story' by Martín Caparrós, '2666' by Roberto Bolaño, 'The Beginnings' by Antonio Moresco, 'Larva' by Julián Ríos, 'Gravity's Rainbow' by Thomas Pynchon, 'The Recognitions' by William Gaddis, 'Q' by Luther Blissett, 'Antagonía' by Luis Goytisolo, and 'Book of Memories' by Péter Nádas. (No, I haven't forgotten the three wise men of fiction: 'Ulysses' by James Joyce, 'In Search of Lost Time' by Marcel Proust, and 'The Man Without Qualities' by Robert Musil.) However, the only root Laiseca clings to is that of Miguel de Cervantes (in this he agrees with Milan Kundera when he claimed that "the novelist owes no one any explanations, except to Cervantes") and his will to disrupt the world through his Rabelaisian and nihilistic satirical tendency.

'Totum revolutum'

And you may ask, of course, yes, okay, but what is this novel about, which has 30,000 more words than 'Ulysses'? I wouldn't know what to tell you, but I will say that it is both a wild satire about power as well as a labyrinth of intricate stories about the absurdity of war in the "cosmic house." An epic of both the domestic and the divine. A density colored by the constant imaginaries of black humor and absurd humor, of sadistic political and religious paranoia, of cold—and hot—wars of sex, astrology, magic, and science. A 'totum revolutum' to turn sheer anachronism into a weapon loaded with future at the forefront of the most avant-garde work you can think of.

It's a work that operates through saturation: the writer was exhausted (he claimed he would never write anything like it again), the reader is exhausted, and I imagine the editors were exhausted publishing a book whose first and last condition is sacrificial: Laiseca knew he had written an unpublishable work (if you don't believe me, see the note on the text on page 689). Conclusion: writing is a war, reading is a war, editing is a war. A total war.

Hyperbolic and hypertrophic

'Los Sorias', if you will, narrates that total war between Soria, Technocracy, and the Soviet Union. If in Soria everyone has the surname Soria, in Technocracy, everyone is Iseka. But the "tedious argument" is not decisive since what prevails is the constant breaking of these narrative lines. I don't think you will find another novel that wants—and can—narrate everything, that is, "the history of humanity from the Stone Age." That's why it's pantagruelian: because the time of the narrative becomes the narrative space of the 1,334 pages to be read.

Hyperbolic and hypertrophic, 'Los Sorias' is "a time machine" ("The only time machines I know are some vehicles with square wheels called novels" with which "to undertake archaeological journeys, unearthing memories, reconstructing with bones and tablets the fall of Nineveh, Babylon, or Atlantis"), a displaced machine that transforms "Thanatos into Eros" and rightfully becomes a conspiratorial, atonal, "encyclopedic, unique, mysterious, and very long" text, says Laiseca himself. A peripheral, transgressive, dystopian, ambiguous, cruel, parodic, labyrinthine, masochistic, and wild, very wild book.

The "tedious argument" is not decisive since what prevails is the constant breaking of these narrative lines

Its "delirious realism" explores the cruelty of power and the mechanisms to "monitor and punish"—comically—all strata of society. Nothing and no one is left out of the persecution that here takes the secret form of a plot. And as in Franz Kafka, it is not that we are innocent until proven guilty, but that we are all guilty until proven innocent.

'Los Sorias'

Author: Alberto Laiseca

Publisher: Barrett

1,360 pages. 41.90 euros