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Gesell Dome

di Guillermo Saccomanno

Altri autori: Vedi la sezione altri autori.

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692381,277 (4.05)2
"Winner of the 2013 Dashiell Hammett Prize--Through a skillful weaving of characters and plotlines, coming together like a completed puzzle, Saccomanno has crafted a monumental novel where individual stories unnerve us while building to the unexpected and explosive finale."--El Mundo. Like True Detective through the lenses of William Faulkner and John Dos Passos, Gesell Dome is a mosaic of misery, a page-turner that will keep you enthralled right until its shocking end. Opening with reports of a child abuse scandal at an elementary school, then weaving its way through dozens of sordid storylines and characters--including various murders, corrupt politicians and real-estate moguls, and the Nazi past of the city--Gesell Dome chronicles the dark underbelly of a popular resort town tensely awaiting the return of the tourist season. Two-time winner of the Dashiell Hammett Prize, Guillermo Saccomanno is Argentina's foremost noir writer, crafting incisive, unflinching books that reveal the inequities of contemporary life. Guillermo Saccomanno is the author of numerous novels and story collections, including El buen dolor, winner of the Premio Nacional de Literatura, and 77 and Gesell Dome, both of which won the Dashiell Hammett Prize. He also received Seix Barral's Premio Biblioteca Breve de Novela for El oficinista and the Rodolfo Walsh Prize for nonfiction for Un maestro. Andrea G. Labinger is the translator of more than a dozen works from the Spanish"--… (altro)
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review of
Guillermo Saccomanno's Gesell Dome
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 26, 2021

For the full review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1334161-guillermo-saccomanno

I started reading this so long ago I don't even remember when it was. I think there were dinosaurs around at the time & constant mist. I might've had a tail. Then again, it cd've been much later, say in 2018. More likely I started it in 2019. Since around the fall of 2018 I've been reading 8 bks that're important to me for 1 reason or another but I've been COLOSSALLY BORED by them. I'm sure that my general disatisfaction during the QUARANTYRANNY hasn't helped but it started before then. I might've finished 2 of those 8 bks during this time.

I don't mean to imply that this was a hard bk to read, I don't mean to imply that it's not well-written &/or well-translated. I might even say that it's exceptional.. but that doesn't mean that I even recommend it! Somehow, my mind has changed in a way in recent yrs that made this bk just. not. for. me.

It's explained in Andrea G. Labinger's Translator's Introduction:

"The Gesell Camera [more commonly known as Gesell Dome]... was conceived as a dome for observing children's behavior without their being disturbed by the presence of strangers. The Gesell Dome consists of two rooms with a dividing wall in between in which a large, one-way mirror allows an observer in one room to see what is happening in the other, but not vice-versa." - p viii

It was the author's intention to describe the activities in an Argentinian sea resort as if it were enclosed in a Gesell Dome - in other words: as if he were privy to all sorts of private lives. This was very ambitious & I think he did a wonderful job. The novel is all short sections about a wide variety of recurring characters.

"Similarly, the novel is peppered with examples of vesre, a feature of lunfardo that involves the reversal of syllables, e.g., Monra for Ramón or tordo for do[c]tor, creating a cryptolect comparable to Pig Latin, back slang, or—distant cousin, perhaps—Cockney English." - p x

The translator's dilemma. She decided against "reversing syllables in the translation" b/c "the effect in English would be too jarring". I kindof wished she'd done it anyway b/c that part of the original is lost.

In general this bk is grim, maybe that's why I didn't ultimately enjoy it. Here's a sample from the beginning:

"one of the gunmen from El Monte, is selling crack to a bunch of kids, and those boys and girls, dressed in hoodies, have just finished poisoning your Rottweiler and in a minute will be pointing a gun at you, forcing your wife to suck them off, fucking your daughter, and you'd better tell them where you keep your cash because you don't know what they're capable of with that iron you won with supermarket bonus points, the iron they've plugged in and is starting to heat up." - p 4

This violence isn't relentless but it is somewhat the norm.

"But we all wear skinny jeans. Stovepipe pants—in my day we called them stovepipes." - p 11

The above is a minor detail but it's the sort of thing I notice. "Stovepipes" are straight, "skinny jeans" taper. Is this a translator error? A deliberate error in the original text? Neither?

"Everyone, I'm saying, including the natives, call this town the Villa. And when they say "Villa," they feel like a superior, chosen race. The kids, on the other hand, those who were born here, almost all share the single goal of getting the hell out. The stoner snobs who want to keep on kicking back take their surfboards to Costa Rica. The blue-collar kids who are looking to earn some cash go to Spain to become dishwashers or to the States to scrub toilets. Wherever it is, they'll be better off. Anywhere but the Villa. This damn town, they call it." - p 12

The Villa does seem like a type of hell, even tho its natural environment is promising, it's all tainted, corpses washing ashore, constant crime, a history of secret nazism, public relations seem like a band-aid over a festering black plague bubo.

"In those days, as the Allies were winning the war, the three or four measly cabins started to multiply. Soon there were a dozen; the settlement grew, taking the shape of a Villa that was recommended by one friend to another among the Buenos Aires German community. During that period the Hotel Wagner was built, with a movie theater, which, according to the old timers, showed The Triumph of the Will. It had a radio and a transmitter, which, they say, communicated with submarines along the Huns' route. Here, at night, a twinkling of light could sometimes be seen where the sea met the sky. Nazi bigwigs disembarked, bringing with them the Führer's gold; they carried passports, like I said, allowing them to return to Hamburg and come back again with more fugitives. Odessa, let's call it. Everyone knows. No one tells." - p 28

Now, an aside here is that once upon a time many or most readers wd understand the reference to The Triumph of the Will as a reference to the (in)famous film of the 1934 nazi Nuremburg rally by Leni Riefenstahl. Many wd've seen the film & had the chance to decide for themselves whether it's a great film or a horrible one or whatever. I've seen the film, I'm very much against its message & I'm not that impressed by it otherwise. I even used excerpts from it in a movie of mine called "P@rty Prop@g@nd@", a movie meant to expose & subvert 20th century propaganda. These days, the film is banned from YouTube & probably not shown much, if at all, in academia. Will an understanding of how propaganda works be lost w/ this censorship? Will people be just as easily duped again?

"Even though she would drag Alba to church, my sister was more of a bookworm. From Little Women to Das Kapital, she read everything that fell into her hands. And whatever didn't fall into her hands, she searched for." - p 41

I'm reminded of Gypsy Rose Lee. Her son had this to say about her in his foreword to her mystery novel Mother Finds a Body:

"She read any book she could buy or shoplift, which resulted in an eccentric range of topics and authors: Decameron, The Blind Bow Boy, Das Capital, and Droll Stories to name a few." - p 6 [ https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2429180220 ]

The Gesell Dome has no secrets.

"And so you find out. In the end you find out. And in the end everyone finds out. Even if you don't want to. I'll give you an example: you have a nieghbor that you never said hello to in your whole life, and without wanting to, you find out: something he's hiding, because we're all hiding something, a humiliation, a vice, a sorrow, and that something comes to light when you least expect it, and the ones you least expected to find out will find out, and after a while the whole town knows, because there are no secrets to be kept here." - p 49

Then there's the classic Western movie stand-off:

"As soon as the posse discovered that the Commissioner had captured one of the suspects, they gathered in front of the police station. It was still nighttime when the 4X4s braked to a halt at the station. Commissioner Frugone came out to meet them. Dobroslav was the one to speak for the group. He demanded that the Commissioner hand over Ramiro. They'd get a confession out of him. Insecurity had its limits, they said. And that you don't screw around with kids. They were prepared to enter the police station by force. Over my dead body, Frugone said. And he pulled out his 9 millimeter. You people can take me down, but I'll pick off a few of you first. Then the members of the posse noticed the gun barrels pointing at them from the ground floor and second floor of the police station. That's the way it happened, Dante said with precision. They must've gotten scared. They left, cursing Frugone under their breath." - p 60

Even more classic is that Dobroslav is the child molestor & he completely gets away w/ it.

"Exclusive interview with Anita López for El Vocero. Our middle school language teacher and a local militant of the Radical Party presented a project for stimulating our youth at the Forum for a Non-Violent Villa" - p 94

"A first step in this project is to promote music. And so today we're going to present a modern musical group made up of three students from our dear institution, this middle school. And we're committed to the development of these young artists: "The Skinheads." - p 95

Ha. ha.

"Joseph Pilates was a sickly child, which led him to study the human body and devise a method of strengthening it through exercise. Thus, in time he became a great athlete. It was in England where he would begin to develop his method, while being detained in a concentration camp during the First World War due to his German nationality. While working as a nurse, he developed a method to improve other detainees' health through exercise. For the weaker and sicker patients he developed a system of pulleys and cords over their beds in order to exercise muscles, the origin of some of the machinery he later invented, like the reformer, the trapeze, the chair, and the barrel." - p 100

Imagine that. I tried reforming society & they put me in a chair in a barrel & pushed me over Niagara Falls telling me there was a trapeze at the bottom. There wasn't. Was Pilates responsible?

"And Jackie starts telling her what she has to tell her, that she should stop screwing around and threatening to separate from Braulio and air family business matters, that if she makes a stink, if she opens her mouth, if she even thinks of ratting on the Kennedy business, it's the end of everything. If she needs to set up the Pilates studio to feel like a big shot, she should go right ahead, but stop being so cocky. Because anyone can have an accident on the highway. What if you're driving with the girls, imagine, and your brakes give out. It can happen to anyone.

"Adriana can't believe what is coming out of Jackie's mouth." - p 111

See what I mean?!

"Just what we needed. Now they're coming out with the story that El Muertito is a baby that the military swallowed up and dropped from one of those death flights. The tide brought in many dead in those days. And all of them got buried around here. Those that weren't destined to end up in the cemetery wound up buried in the dunes. No use stirring up those times again." - p 140

The reference is to Argentina's "Dirty War" era. That is so important to me as a low-point in human history that I quote a lengthy section from my review of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's The Buenos Aires Quintet ( https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/382361-don-t-let-them-get-away?chapter=1 )

""The Argentine army's "Dirty War" disappeared 30,000 people, and the last thing Pepe Carvalho wants is to investigate one of the vanished, even if that missing person is his cousin, But blood proves thicker than a fine Mondoza Cabernet Sauvignon, even for a jaded gourmand like Pepe, and so at his family's request he leaves Barcelona for Buenos Aires."

"I subscribed to a magazine called "CounterSpy" in 1980 & to another magazine called "CovertAction Information Bulletin" from 1980 to 1982. Both magazines published exposés of CIA connections to oppressive regimes the world over. I remember seeing an/the editor of CounterSpy on a TV talk show defending himself for the magazine's disclosure of CIAgents info. Wikipedia states that "the 1975 murder of Richard S. Welch, the CIA Station Chief in Greece, by Revolutionary Organization 17 November was blamed by some on disclosures in magazines such as CounterSpy." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CounterSpy_Magazine ) CounterSpy's position was that the info they disclosed was already public knowledge & that, of course, such disclosures served positive political purposes by providing resistance to CIA covert operations.

"However, it was CovertAction that really impressed me. Around 1981, I was reading its investigations into the military junta's death & torture squads in Argentina. Datings vary substantially, but for simplicity's sake, the main era of state-sponsored terrorism took place from 1976 to 1983 w/ estimates of victims varying. For the purposes of this review, 30,000 leftists were disappeared by the military during this time. CovertAction Information Bulletin (later called CovertAction Quarterly from 1992 'til its unfortunate demise in 2005) gave extremely detailed info about the tortures & murders committed by the military during this time. I found the explicitness of the terror almost unbearable to even read about.

"According to Wikipedia, in 1985 "The government of Raúl Alfonsín began to develop cases against offenders. It organised a tribunal to conduct prosecution of offenders, and in 1985 the Trial of the Juntas was held. The top military officers of all the juntas were among the nearly 300 people prosecuted, and the top men were all convicted and sentenced for their crimes. This is the only Latin American example of the government conducting such trials. Threatening another coup, the military opposed subjecting more of its personnel to such trials and forced through passage of Ley de Punto Final in 1986, which "put a line" under previous actions and ended prosecutions for crimes under the dictatorship. Fearing military uprisings against them, Argentina’s first two presidents inflicted punishment only to top Dirty War ex-commanders, and even then, very conservatively. Despite President Raúl Alfonsín’s 1983 establishment of CONADEP, a commission to investigate the atrocities of the Dirty War, in 1986 the Ley de Punto Final (Full Stop Law) provided amnesty to Dirty War acts, stating that torturers were doing their “jobs"." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War )

"One of the torturers outed in CovertAction was nicknamed the "Blond Angel".

For the full review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1334161-guillermo-saccomanno ( )
  tENTATIVELY | Apr 3, 2022 |
Another well-done production from Open Letter Press. Great cover, good book.

A Gessel Dome, as the introduction explains, is the two-way mirror used to observe, suspects, children and animals in a "natural environment." This is the perfect double entendre to describe Villa Gesell, a real place, much like every other tourist town, except for the undercurrent of racism, sodomy, pedophilia, incest, murder, gang violence, mass rape, pillaging, burglary, gossip, blackmail, adultery, and every other imaginable corruption Saccomanno describes with journalistic detachment. The sentences are short, but the stories are dense. Probably gleaned from thousands of newspaper accounts, the author compiled short sections in this novel, centering the events around recurring main characters, and interpolating occasional commentary, snide humor, and reflections.

Overall, I found the author's method engrossing and effective. Spread over 600 pages, this technique of recounting gruesome incidents, one after another, without much framework or context, felt a little like scanning newspapers in a particularly grisly time and place, trying to solve some sort of case, the extent of which keeps expanding infinitely in every direction. It was as if he picked out the worst and most representative parts of journalism's intellectual territory and pasted them together in a sociopathic album.

It is easy to believe that the author wrote for film and cartoons, given the absurd level of antics he includes. The sheer number of events and the amount of perversity strains credibility, but it is satirical in its use of the subject matter. The book has one foot in the realm of pulp fiction and the other planted fully in the arena of great literature. The use of short sentences is key. It is written in a quickly paced, fully fleshed style, cyclical and recursive, mirroring the mindset of addiction, of consumption, of sin, and encouraging the reader to race forward in an ever-increasing enthusiasm, throwing caution and morality to the high winds. But those jettisoned scruples are the same ones that hover accusingly in our wake.

There is continual reaffirmation that the plots occur on the same street corners as one another, right around the corner from the last atrocity, in the same neighborhood, the same stores and bars, where the same sorry individuals relive these horrendous crimes and tragedies, until the grotesque level of death, sexuality, miscarriages, brutality, etc., become a microcosm, the opposite of the Garden of Eden, or a prison...

"We are strangers to ourselves." We know more about strangers than we know about ourselves - that is what the Dante tells us. He is the aptly named narrator. The storyteller, though he is not immune to partaking in the derelict culture of the domain that is his jurisdiction. He is the one publishing the events in the Villa, and many people blame him for spreading the virus of their own troubles.

A cacophony of voices confessing, accusing, and hectoring, but rarely taking responsibility for their ethical failures, the tragedies depend as much on human folly as on Fate's whimsy. Like characters observed in a fish tank, the reader will pick out favorites from the catalogue of vice, men and women in their darkest moments, much like the menu of death served up in Bolaño's 2666.

The gritty, grisly, suicidal town is also concerned with the symbolic construction of a sewer system that will clear out all of the accumulated stink and pave the way for greater commerce and an influx of purity into their lives. Really, they just want more tourists to come next season and drop a dime. What tourist would want to come to such a place, the reader wonders? And we all know things are not going to get any better for these people. They have dug themselves so deep, what hope is there for them? It is rather sad, if a bit entertaining to vicariously experience their cruel existences.

The Villa is defined by the scandals within it. "Los abusaditos," the victims of child abuse, brutally described throughout the novel, brought up like a dark stain on the inhabitants' consciences, are a shared responsibility, and the focal point in the whole state of affairs, while the underfunded police force, complain about their lack of car batteries and weapons, their inability to clean up the festering corpse of a community they call home.

I enjoyed the parallel to "Waiting for Godot," which the townsfolk bastardize and interpret in their own way. In fact, I enjoyed all of it, and will read more by this author. ( )
  LSPopovich | Apr 8, 2020 |
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Nome dell'autoreRuoloTipo di autoreOpera?Stato
Guillermo Saccomannoautore primariotutte le edizionicalcolato
Labinger, Andrea G.Traduttoreautore secondarioalcune edizioniconfermato
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"Winner of the 2013 Dashiell Hammett Prize--Through a skillful weaving of characters and plotlines, coming together like a completed puzzle, Saccomanno has crafted a monumental novel where individual stories unnerve us while building to the unexpected and explosive finale."--El Mundo. Like True Detective through the lenses of William Faulkner and John Dos Passos, Gesell Dome is a mosaic of misery, a page-turner that will keep you enthralled right until its shocking end. Opening with reports of a child abuse scandal at an elementary school, then weaving its way through dozens of sordid storylines and characters--including various murders, corrupt politicians and real-estate moguls, and the Nazi past of the city--Gesell Dome chronicles the dark underbelly of a popular resort town tensely awaiting the return of the tourist season. Two-time winner of the Dashiell Hammett Prize, Guillermo Saccomanno is Argentina's foremost noir writer, crafting incisive, unflinching books that reveal the inequities of contemporary life. Guillermo Saccomanno is the author of numerous novels and story collections, including El buen dolor, winner of the Premio Nacional de Literatura, and 77 and Gesell Dome, both of which won the Dashiell Hammett Prize. He also received Seix Barral's Premio Biblioteca Breve de Novela for El oficinista and the Rodolfo Walsh Prize for nonfiction for Un maestro. Andrea G. Labinger is the translator of more than a dozen works from the Spanish"--

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