Finally I have a moment to review August by Romina Paula, a novel out of Argentina whose action is small, but whose pathos yawn as wide as a cropped summit quarry. Our narrator Emilia—whose I means and you knows mark her as a twenty-something—apostrophises throughout the book to her friend Claudia, dead five years since when Emilia and she were teenagers, and now being exhumed so her family and best friend can scatter her ashes. This is, however, only the instigating event of the novel, its momentum picked up not a little into the book by Emilia’s encounter with her teenage ex-boyfriend Julián, who is now married and has a son, while his wife (an immature younger girl who he married upon her pregnancy with their first child) is now pregnant with another. Emilia has spent the interregnum in Buenos Aires, meanwhile, far from Esquel, the small town in Patagonia where she, Julián, and Claudia all grew up together. Emilia feels ambivalence about her life in Buenos Aires, about the rat-infested apartment she lives in with her brother Ramiro, and about the seemingly strong but in actuality bloodless romantic relationship she has with Manuel, her punk-rocker boyfriend. Now returned to her hometown, Emilia is feeling irresistible pangs of doubt about her choices in life, specifically her choice to leave Julián after the death of Claudia, and to not build with him that other life which she now sees as having fallen to Julián’s younger bride, Mariela.

Much of this information is relayed in a conversation with Emilia and Julián‘s mutual friend Vanina, whose chatterbox nature is admirably made distinct from Emilia’s inner monologue in combined free indirect thought and speech.

When some people asked me about this book, I struggled to make the plot sound terribly appealing. “It’s about this young woman who returns home and burns with envy over her ex-boyfriend and his wife and kids.” (Upon hearing which no less than two people told me it didn’t sound like the sort of book they would enjoy.) I think it’s true that the novel is very much of an opposite tendency to escapism: here there is little action, and more than a little reflection. Emilia also isn’t, at least in her outline as a jealous lover and potential homewrecker, someone we would normally regard sympathetically or who would normally be chosen as the narrator. We like our heroes to master their feelings, but August primarily shows Emilia giving way to them; in fact, when Emilia tells the reader, “My life is not what one would term heroic,” this one-line explanation follows a paragraph where Emilia wakes up to a feeling of “overwhelming anguish, unbearable, so bad I couldn’t see straight,” and decides to go to her old friend Vanina’s bar, where there is a strong chance she might meet her former lover. The stoic thing to do—the thing the detached reader would have Emilia do—is to not go to Vanina’s bar, not try to see Julián, and to leave well-enough alone; but one of the strengths of Romina Paula’s novel is that we are not allowed to be detached, we are brought into direct contact with the powerful emotions that make people do the non-rational things, the things that feel right, even if objectively they aren’t.

This difference between Emilia’s noble, correct sentiments and the involuntary, even violent emotions she feels is exampled by this passage regarding Mariela.

The conceit of the narrative being addressed to a dead person allows Emilia to vent the most ignoble-seeming thoughts, the things we would never admit to feeling, even though we do (note here how Emilia grudgingly identifies Mariela as first a “person”, then a “girl”, then finally a “woman”):

I can’t tolerate the idea that he’s had children with another person, another girl, another woman. The idea that there could be little hims in the world, and that they would have nothing to do with me, is painful, I don’t know why, or I don’t know why it’s so bad, I guess I hadn’t ever really imagined it, I’d always assumed he’d be kind of lost in the world, trying to reconstruct his life, and now it turns out that he didn’t waste any time at all, didn’t waste a single second, and obviously he wouldn’t have been on his own for this whole time, with his charisma, which you’ve got to give him. The son of a bitch is enchanting.

Emilia’s loss of Julián is wrapped up in her identity, because before she regarded herself as the prize, the one who could afford to make him wait, who he would have to make an especial effort to pursue, who he would struggle to recover from the loss of; in reality, he did not struggle, she was not the prize, and she could not afford to make him wait, and he didn’t wait. “The idea that there could be little hims in the world, and that they would have nothing to do with” Emilia is for her a stunning revelation because it means that she was not so integral to his happiness as she thought. It is this same unfamiliar displacement Emilia struggles with when she laments the “artificial death” that occurs when a romantic relationship ends, how suddenly what was vital and important gets violently cut off and ceases to exist, like a phantom limb.

The burning desire Emilia feels is mirrored in what she sees; it is an old trick of the dramatist, when the tension is at its highest, to march in a farcical simulacrum of the outer tragedy, as Thomas de Quincy explained in “On The Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” and here Emilia arrives at Vanina’s bar, burning with desire to see Julián, and is overcome with emotion at seeing him, and goes to the bathroom, whereupon this happens:

I splash some water on my face. Some girls come in, very excited, and one of them, the one that’s furthest gone, shouts to the other, a girl with curly hair, neither of them’s over fifteen, she says, did you see him, did you see him, and the other says, he’s so gorgeous, it’s unbelievable, I just can’t even handle it, I’m dying, I’m the most in love with him, bitch I liked him first, okay we can share him, okay let’s share, which is when I exit the bathroom, I leave.

Thomas de Quincy says that such moments as these serve as a parenthesis for moments which are awful, inhuman. We the terrible bracketed off both to relieve our tension as readers (or the audience) and to provide a contrast with the normal workings of the world, where love is frivolous and spontaneous, not an aching wound that lasts for years. When the moment finally comes when Emilia encounters Julián at long last, it is just an awful moment.

He spins around on his stool and let’s me approach him. He smiles. Oh, but he is so painfully reminiscent of himself. Hey, I say to him, stretching the ey part out, like clinging on to the y in it.

Emilia’s greatest fear in this moment is seeming desperate, seeming clingy. She admits in the next paragraph:

The hey is absolutely false, and its only purpose is to slightly conceal my perplexity and to make the moment, the meeting, less important. Accompanied by a couple of slaps on the back, my will to desolemnify, to make it lighter, is negated as soon as my nose makes contact again with his scent. Fuck me. It smells so much like Julián.

When the two of them give a friendly hug, their favorite song comes on the stereo in the bar. The entire moment is awful for Emilia because she is made to feel desperate, made to feel dependent, made to feel like a phantom limb—cut off, yet still attached. And immediately in the next paragraph, Emilia attempts to bracket it as a separate thing:

That moment, of course, is completed, over and done with, doesn’t exist for anything except itself, it has no past, no future.

Another way to describe the emotions Emilia feels in the novel is as a sense of suspension, when you are watching things happen and you cannot move on from them. A notable aspect of Romina Paula’s prose style which makes this suspension palpable (if Jennifer Croft’s translation is to be judged a fair approximation of it) are her repetitive albeit iterative phrases, comma-separated, flying from thought to thought, as if the reader is being suspended aloft together with the narrator and we can’t come down until the passing of the moment. So we see these anaphoric repetitions when Emilia is at the bar and anguishing over seeing Julián:

There was a reason why I left, I remind myself, there was a reason why I left back then, if Julián and I had been in love I would have stayed, wouldn’t I have stayed? [Ed. note: this actually turns the phrase inside out as Emilia interrogates her own assumption about what she would have done.] Just think of all the things I didn’t like about him. Just think of all the things I didn’t like about him: he was, well, he was selfish, temperamental, that was what it was, he was difficult and despotic, such a despot, always ended up having his way. I see him, he has his back to me, he’s seated at the bar with his back to me.

There is one chapter in particular which is half made up of these anaphoric sentences, an extended anaphoric idyll. I suppose this chapter had beautiful thoughts in it, but as a whole the broader sentiments of pain and loneliness seemed repetitive, an issue I had with the larger novel. Romina Paula explains Emilia and Julián‘s history well, and yet once we understand its dynamics the story as a whole seems to lose momentum; or rather, the renewed romance doesn’t really entrance Emilia and Julián as thought it might. They go for a drive along the Patagonian coast, ostensibly to see if they want to renew the relationship. They wind up in a small town, make love in Julián‘s car, and end up in a dingy restaurant with cheap place mats. The reality of Julián, in contrast to the idea of him, simply doesn’t attract Emilia enough to keep her from her other life, and the ending of the novel conveys that prosaic quality of their relationship well, even if the result seems like an anticlimax.