Chris Andrews on La Orilla Africana (“The African Shore”) by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

By Chris Andrews — Published on December 7, 2009
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Chris Andrews

Some of Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s fiction has been translated—beautifully—by Paul Bowles and by Esther Allen, but most of his books are still waiting. I particularly hope that one day soon there will be such a thing in the world as the experience of reading La Orilla Africana (“The African Shore”) in English. La Orilla Africana is set in and around Tangiers, presumably during the detention of Augusto Pinochet in London (1998-2000), since “the fate of Pinochet” comes up in a dinnertime conversation. The main human character is something of a mystery. Absent from the novel’s beginning and end, he also remains, in a sense, absent throughout, partly because the narrator recounts his actions far more than his thoughts. Although his name is strategically withheld until the final section, we soon learn that he is a young Colombian tourist in no hurry to return to his wife in Cali. When he loses his passport and has to wait for a replacement, he is glad as well as anxious. In the weeks of waiting, his old life begins to unravel, as he wanders through the streets of Tangiers in search of accommodation and kif, and is variously helped or used or both (and it is often hard to tell) by a louche Honorary Consul, a pair of French women with a vacation house, a local cafe owner and an adolescent shepherd dreaming of riches to come. The Colombian is the novel’s main human character, but not really its protagonist, for two reasons. First, for most of the story’s duration, he is uncommonly passive (the key incident in which we learn his name is also the point at which he recovers agency). And second, his presence doesn’t make the novel hang together. That function falls to an owl, which circulates among the human characters, linking their lives. The owl is more than a mere plot device: it reveals what the humans are too wary or embarrassed to show each other—the need for power, the will to care—and is also a locus of experience: in two discreet but crucial passages we perceive the world through its eyes and ears. La Orilla Africana is written in very short chapters (sometimes less than a page long) that often stop before the point at which a less subtle novelist would aim for strong effects. But Rey Rosa’s ellipses are not an excuse for plotlessness. On the contrary, La Orilla Africana is expertly designed; it raises a series of small and large questions, which relay one another cunningly, maintaining narrative tension up to the haunting conclusion, and indeed beyond, providing for ongoing puzzlement: What exactly happened there? It is tempting to call La Orilla Africana a minimalist novel, because of its scaled-down look, but that would be misleading. Although it systematically avoids emphasis, it touches on large and urgent themes: the trafficking of human beings and substances at the frontier between Africa and Europe; the long tail of colonialism. It is a novel that generates powerful reality effects by very precise scene-setting and mapping of itineraries, but at certain moments it also has an undeniable metaphysical resonance. The world it constructs is a hard place, where trust is risky, but also a place of intricate resilience, where fevers abate and bones knit up, where power is slippery and the powerless can sometimes seize their chance.

Chris Andrews has translated numerous works from Latin American writers, including several novels by Roberto Bolaño.

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