As a text that comes short in the qualities of texture and materiality that most American readers expect from Spanish American fiction, Requiem por un suicida, a novel by the Mexican René Avilés Fabila, is per force a perplexing piece of writing. Due perhaps to the homogeneous nature of its language and the apparent onedimensional character of its theme, this is a work marked by the disenchanting quality of a difficult simplicity, a fact that makes it characteristically teasing in its hermeneutic possibilities. Heavily foregrounded on the thematics of suicide, teeming as it is with suicidal stories and theories on suicide, it deceitfully leads the unsuspecting reader on the surface of its most apparent propositions, away from the ironic values that make this novel a piece of writing that commands serious critical attention. There is here the authority of a theme that gets in the eyes of the reader, counterbalanced by a style only in appearance rhetorically sober and deceitfully flat in hermeneutic intention. Here, the reader must skillfully maneuver the hermeneutics of a text that is equally poised between ambivalent, even contradictory forces. More than anything else, the reader must deflect, and steer clear of the sirens that sing in the voice of the narrator. In an extreme heuristic move, the reader might find in this novel much to be dismissed as a textureless and unconvincing effort to portray the redemptive virtues of love and suicidal annihilation, at the same time that enough is given as to be able to suspect its ironic intentions. Fabila’s novel stands firmly grounded on this ambiguity and the focal point that gives rise to such an ambivalent textual dynamics is both the main character in the story and the structuring of the recite. Thus approached, Requiem por un suicida appears as what its truly is a trap for readers unaware of its deceitful clues and its real hermeneutic possibilities. The reader must surpass the bulging thematic dimension and glimpse in a distant horizon at the ironic qualities of Requiem, where Fabila is at his best. The deceitful power of the narrative is due in great part to the fact that the past of the main and perhaps only character is barely alluded by the narrator and dimly visible on the most immediate level of the narrative. On this level the narrative space swells with the obsessive suicidal project of Gustavo Trevino a middle aged writer whose existential project had been politically and artistically defined by the well-known cultural concerns of the Sixties "la década prodigiosa" as he would call this period of social and political upheaval. For the character those are heroic years, an epoch long left behind and buried by the time the main story in this novel is taking place. However, eminent in the narrative instance is not this past but Trevino’s plans to commit suicide, and a long obsessive discourse that consecrates self-inflicted death as the highest expression of man’s moral and aesthetic possibilities. Another major anecdotic development on this level is one in which Trevino, the first person narrator in his own story is himself writing a novel. At this point a peculiar mise-end-abime is produced that given its centrality in the structure of the novel, proves decisive as a hermeneutic device. The device is here called peculiar since, aside from the fact that a story unfolds within another story, the story thus being generated functions as a mirror for the original one. A structuring of this kind takes graphic representation in the way each chapter is consistently divided into two sections, one of which is marked out parenthetically, signaling in this way what deceitfully suggests itself as two spaces ontologically different in this novel. The device is deceitful, while it effectively controls the reading of the novel as a key component of its textual norm. It is deceitful since it marks a boundary that is never there, the boundary between fiction and reality as suggested by the first and second stories. This much being accepted --a boundary between fiction and reality that soon shows to be nonexistent--, a first step is taken on a path that leads to the unmasking not only of the character-narrator in its lack of moral credibility, but of a whole period in the history of modern radical culture, one in which political will became superseded by mere cultural and literary posturing. There is much in this novel in the form of explicit statement that supports this reading, and here the main source is the narrator himself. At one point, Gustavo Treviño, quite flatly and not at all disingenuously, proclaims: "Lo que está dentro de los libros me es propio, lo demás llega a desconcertarme." (p.175) Engrossed as he is in his obsessive ruminations on self-annihilation, the narrator provides meager information about his past in the guerrilla movement of the Sixties, but then the little information he gives is all too revealing, not only of his own failure but the failure of literature itself as a means to achieve revolutionary objectives. With no trace of irony on his part, Gustavo Treviño writes to his friend in Rome: "¿Qué [sic] si llevé diario en la guerrilla? No, Eduardo [...] Escribí notas para un libro amoroso. Lo que sucedía en derredor mío honestamente no me interesaba [...] Yo, dentro de la modesta intentona que llevamos a cabo, pensaba en literatura y [...] hablaba de mis autores favoritos, para colmo fantásticos: Poe, Lovecraft, Swift, Stevenson, Verne, Quiroga, Borges... " (p. 141) At the end of the novel there is an Epílogo that concludes with these words: "[...] regresando de Europa, Gustavo concluyó una novela sobre el suicidio, su propia novela, y finalmente se mató." (p. 210). At this point, though, the reader has enough reasons to believe that the character thus taking his own life is mere printed matter, a character a la letter. And so, it was, one is led to believe, Gustavo's "década prodigiosa". Although sober in the tone of its language and narrative strategies, Fabila's novel quite effectively brings to closure some of the monumental hopes and failed expectations that ran their course in this century. René Avilés Fabila is a journalist and University professor in Mexico City. The following are some of his most important novels: Los juegos (1967), El gran solitario de Palacio (1971), Tantadel (1975), La canción de Odette (1982). Humor and satire are characteristics that mark most of his fiction.
* Madrid, Spain. Libertarias/Prodhufi. 1993. 210 pages.
