Daniel Galera. Blood-Drenched Beard. Trans. Alison Entrekin. New York: Penguin, 2016. E-book.
“Everyone who comes here goes out of their mind a little in their first winter here, swimmer. It’s a rite of passage.” (4831)
Perhaps the best way to describe Blood-Drenched Beard is say it something like Hemingway meets Jack London with a little gothic famly drama thrown in. The main character is a drifter, a slightly over-the-hill Ironman triathlete who still trains and gets by from teaching swimming lessons when he can.
The novel wanders a bit, as he gets in and out of relationships with women, but it gives us a sense of his rootlessness. At the same time, the heart of the story is the gothic search for the truth behind an apparent family crime.
His grandfather was never mentioned by his father as he was growing up, but shortly before his father kills himself, he tells our protagonist that his own father was brutally stabbed to death at a dance at the idyllic seaside village of Garopaba in the south of Brazil.
Our protagonist (I thought I found his name once in the novel, but I could not relocate it; it might have been the name of a town) moves to Garopaba to practice swimming, but also to informally investigate the story of his grandfather. Like most swimmers, he has always been clean-shaven, but he grows a beard to make himself look virtually identical to his grandfather.
Some older people in the town look shocked when they see him. A few even mention that he looks like someone they once knew. Gradually, the story of his grandfather’s murder is revealed, but nearly everyone is reluctant to talk about him or his death. In effect, this is Far Southern Gothic. (Southern Hemisphere Gothic?)
Our protagonist then goes on a quest into the nearby coastal mountain jungle region to track down even more people who may know something of his grandfather.
This ends up being a wild survival story—complete with loyal dog—that Jack London might have written if he had gone to Brazil instead of the Klondike. That in itself may be a rite of passage.
While slow-paced at first, the reader is taken into the family mystery, and our protagonist’s quest is always in the back of the mind.
I have read some comments on this story that say it is magical realism. I am inclined to think that that is only because people expect magical realism from contemporary Latin American novels and stories. It is more like Kerouac: flings with women, drinking, experimenting with Buddhism, a search for a relative, an Odyssey of sorts.
Having said that, if (and that is a big if)one takes the preface as part of the story rather than how the author was inspired to write the story, then maybe it is magical realism after all. In that case, though, the timing is off because the story was published in 2010 and mentions Obama’s election in the United States, and the events in the preface were said to have happened many years before. Of course, if the preface is meant to be from a half-century in the future…
One of Hemingway’s heroes (also unnamed, though some think it may be Nick Adams) says “we were all a little detached.” So our hero is a little detached from others. Because of that, he is modern rather than postmodern. His parents are divorced. Obviously, his father commits suicide, and his grandfather is someone no one talks about except in legendary terms. He is also estranged from his brother, his one sibling. And he comes across as a “commitment-phobe” in his relationships with women.
There is also another reason why he might be detached. He was born that way. He has a condition called prosopagnosia. That means that he is not able to remember faces. He has learned other ways to remember people—their voice, their hands, their smell—but this also makes others think he is stand-offish. Unless he has come to know someone well, he has long ago given up trying to explain it because people simply find it hard to believe. One can guess that the prosopagnosia is a symbol.
The question is whether or not his quest will get him re-attached with life. Is the outcome a shock? A disappointment? Or simply the way things are because there is nothing new under the sun? (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
Let us just say there are significant parallels in family relationships in this story. There is a reason why his grandfather was out of the picture even as a memory while he was growing up. There is a similar reason why he cannot reconnect with his brother and sister-in-law.
(That is where the postmodern/magical realism narrative issue may come in. The preface talks about an uncle the writer never met, and at the end of the story we learn that our protagonist is going to be an uncle. Same uncle?)
Galera speculates on the significance of these things:
Either there is free will, or there isn’t. If we have choices, we are responsible for them. If there’s no free will, if the universe is predetermined by the laws of nature and everything is just the result of what has gone before, then no one is to blame for what they do. (5128)
It’s the same old question of moral responsibility and action.
We are not going to find any “solution” to the question of free will. As Milton famously wrote about those in hell:
Others apart sat on a hill retired,
In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high
Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.
Of good and eveil much they argued then,
Of happiness and final misery,
Passion and apathy, and glory and shame.
Vain wisdom all and false philosophy;
Yet with pleasing sorcery could charm
Pain for a while or anguish, and excite
Fallacious hope, or arm the obdurèd breast
With stubborn patience as with triple steel. (Paradise Lost 2.557-569)
Yes, alas, vain wisdom, though not our hero’s original intent, but Blood-Drenched Beard still includes some pleasing sorcery even if its wisdom is all “under the sun.”
N.B.: References to passages in the novel are Amazon Kindle locations, not page numbers.