Book Review: Atacama, A Character-Driven Struggle for a Just Society

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Atacama

Carmen rodriguez | Fernwood Publishing (Nova Scotia and Winnipeg, 2021)

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$ 22 | 241pp

A historical fiction that spans decades and continents, Atacama explores ideological confrontations with bloody and fatal consequences.

Reflecting on social justice in her sophomore novel, Vancouver-based poet and educator Carmen Rodríguez illuminates the enormous difficulty of achieving equality between humans: rich and poor, male and female, progressives and conservatives, heterosexual and queer, in the best circumstances. But in an age of oppressive politics, economic turmoil, militarism, and corruption, a just society seems even more remote.

At its best, Atacama offers a gripping and emotionally resonant storytelling. It is easy to understand why. In his Epilogue, Rodríguez mentions inspiring anecdotes from his parents; several of them ended up in the novel.

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Rodríguez also relays his mother’s surprising deathbed confession: a lifelong hatred for his father, a Chilean military officer, originated with the blood on his hands. Reflecting the author’s research on her own family history, this man evokes fear as the novel’s main villain.

The fallout from the decline of the nitrate industry in the 1920s may be hard to sell for readers, but Rodríguez cleverly weaves economic history with the stories of Manuel and Lucía, a star-crossed couple born in vastly different circumstances.

As Atacama opens, skinny little Manuel is considering a career as a miner; It is 1925, he is 12 years old and he is happy at home in a shack with a dirt floor. Born the same year, but to a socialist mother and a rapidly rising father in the army, Lucia seems destined for a life of abundance and comfort.

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In a matter of pages, half of Manual’s “agitator” family has been murdered during a labor dispute; he moved to a larger city, Iquique, which he considers beautiful compared to the mining settlement.

Meanwhile, in her hometown, Lucia has a heartbreaking experience when human corpses emerge from the floods, the work of her father’s men. Wide-eyed at the privilege of her family and the monstrous immorality of her father, she refuses to suppress her outrage. Soon he will move to Iquique “very, very ugly.” There are Lucia and Manual, two old souls.

Rodríguez tracks their relationship, which evolves as their circumstances change over and over again. Manuel becomes an office worker and journalist, eventually traveling to report on the Spanish Civil War. Away from her father, Lucía joins the Communist Youth, begins in modern dance and falls in love with Pilar, a young woman immersed in revolutionary politics.

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The two live and breathe politics; With your occupations, activism, and deep-seated desires for justice and equality, there is no shortage of causes to rally behind. For decades, Lucia endured infamy, learning that the “communist ideal of equality for all did not include homosexuals”; It reinvents itself by changing its name to one that the author shares with her. Heartbroken and hardened by Spain, Manuel, however, maintains faith in a better world.

Reunited, he is an anarchist and she is a communist; both have little faith in “bourgeois institutions.” Linked “by pain and a common enemy,” their complicated friendship lasts for decades, until 1949 when, like “the scourge of the earth,” they are transported to a prison camp in the Atacama desert.

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A less successful aspect of Atacama relates to character and exposure. In Rodríguez’s imagination, the characters are often portrayed as exclusively engaged in politics and related debates about motives, tactics, and stances. From time to time they register as incarnations of ideologies and slogans, rather than as individuals; They are concerned with universal health care, labor laws, the interests of the proletariat, the oppressors and free education … and the workers, capitalism, the revolution, Stalin, the intellectuals and imperialism.

Fortunately, when they are in love, heartbroken, angry, or exultant, they engage like figures in a novel.

That occasional strained characterization is compounded by detailed exposition. Rodríguez restricts the narrative flow with lists of names and events that do not serve her novel particularly well. These patches could even induce fear that quizzes have been inactive since high school.

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Consider just two examples:

“A few days later, west of Artesa de Segre, the Nationalists were arrested by the Twenty-Sixth Division, the army that our anarchist hero Buenaventura Durruti had originally formed in 1936 and which the Barcelona militiamen had arrived at. Now the Division was waiting for a new nationalist attack. “

“Thus we learned that the republican colonel Segismundo Casado and the socialist politician Julián Besteiro had carried out a coup against Prime Minister Juan Negrín and had replaced their government with a National Defense Council. Apparently, Casado, Besteiro and their allies believed that, unlike Negrín, they could negotiate a ‘good’ peace agreement with Franco ”.

With such mouthfuls of factual recitation, Rodríguez risks readers losing touch with the beating heart of an otherwise praiseworthy novel.

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