REVIEWS | Francisco Rebelledo's Rasero



A Philosopher in the Bedroom
An Empire of Selfishness and Stupidity

RASERO
by Francisco Rebolledo
Louisiana State University Press
552 pages, $24.95
Washington Post Book World. Nov. 12, 1995. P.1


By Jordan Elgrably

We live in an age when information is often prized over knowledge, high-tech weaponry and toxic chemicals are destroying the earth, and the culture of reality, because it seems more relevant to us than literature, has usurped the culture of storytelling. This, at any rate, is the thesis of Rasero, a mature first novel by Mexican author Francisco Rebolledo. A roman fleuve descendent from such distinguished forebears as Tolstoi, Dickens or James, Rasero almost seems an anachronism in form, yet it is fundamentally subversive because it challenges our notion of history.

Rebolledo, a former teacher of science and chemistry at Mexico City's National Autonomous University, cleverly juxtaposes Reality versus Truth by showing the reader that interpretation is everything.

First published in Mexico in 1993, Rasero was chosen out of 427 entries from seven Latin American countries for last year's Pegasus Prize. It appears in an excellent English translation by Helen R. Lane. Ms. Lane has previously done justice to such long narratives as Roa Bastos's I, the Supreme and Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World.

The eponymous hero, Fausto Rasero, is an 18th-century Andalusian who has the unusual distinction of having known many of the key figures of the Enlightenment. A resident of Paris throughout much of the book, Rasero hobnobs with Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau and philosopher David Hume. He befriends the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who discovered oxygen and formulated the modern chemical dictum, "Nothing is lost, nothing is created." Rasero even loans a young Mozart his piano.

But the novel's central conceit surrounds Rasero's unrepentant womanizing and the troubling, otherworldly visions he experiences upon orgasm, visions which haunt him for much of his long life, until he comes to realize that he has, in fact, been seeing "the future as though I were seeing it through a window." A virtual witness to the Spanish Civil War, the concentration camps, Hiroshima, Vietnam and man's launch into space, Rasero's visions, inexorably linked to sexual climax (though never onanism), are "a sort of sickness," indeed, an addiction.

Rebolledo explores his hero's addiction through intense relationships with the high minds of the age, and with several famous women such as Madame de Pompadour. Being irrepressibly Latin, the author makes much mention throughout of breasts, buttocks, seduction and sexual pleasure, though patient readers will view this as evidence of Rasero's great joie de vivre—of a love of the flesh as much as the spirit. A contemporary of Casanova, Rasero is such a romantic that the first time he sees the lovely body of the woman of his life, Mariana, he regrets not having "the skill or the talent...to immortalize the impressive figure on canvas."

Inasmuch as a character creates his author, Rebolledo is Rasero's alter ego, for he views great love-making as "that fleeting instant when we cease to be what we are, and turn into divinities..."

In a tome of 552 pages, Rebolledo uses interior monologues to explore Rasero's life as well as nearly everyone he ever meets. Going into nearly every character's consciousness, however—while democratic and thorough—at times leads to long-winded digressions. The novel could have been perhaps ten to fifteen percent shorter and that much more powerful. Yet for those readers who have the luxury of languorous afternoons or evenings to spend in lucubration, Rasero may be the contemporary equivalent of a 19th-century classic, its expansive narrative an antidote to the usual tripe dominating today's bestseller lists.

Perhaps the author's caveat as to the veracity of history explains why he has felt the need to re-imagine the Enlightenment at such length. "Don't believe a word of what they taught you in school," Rasero admonishes his surrogate son. "History is written by the powerful to justify their acts; that makes it as fantastic as a work by Swift."

Throughout, Rasero contrasts the ideological differences between Voltaire and Rousseau. While the former believed that social reform and individual liberty would advance human progress, the latter was convinced that "our acts lead us to a worse and worse future; it is history that defeats us." Rasero's apocalyptic visions, two hundred years before our time, clearly weigh on the side of Rousseau.

Certainly Rebolledo sees no reason why science and art can't cohabit in a work of art. In this he frequently brings to mind the late Primo Levi, who introduced his love of chemistry in The Periodic Table and other works. Rebolledo uses science and art to organize world chaos into manageable, even ecstatic moments. To call what Rebolledo has done Magic Realism, however, is to dismiss the absolute freshness of his voice. Rebolledo is faithful above all to his characters and their history, which may be, after all, more truthful than many historiographies of the period. Even as Rasero is steeped in the European tradition of the novel, it creates its own space by seeing the future so clearly in the past.

An artist's unconscious, often wild and brilliant, is his finest asset. Rebolledo's has produced a work of great clarity, wisdom and mirth. His Rasero is one of the most elegant novels to appear in the Spanish language in years.

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