La uruguaya (The Uruguayan Woman) (2017)
Pedro Mairal
142 pages
Lucas Pereyra, the narrator of Pedro Mairal’s captivating novel La uruguaya (The Uruguayan Woman), leaves his home in the Argentinian capital of Buenos Aires early one Tuesday morning for a day trip across the La Plata river to Montevideo, Uruguay. A writer, he has been given advances to work on two new books, and in order to avoid paying stiff Argentinian taxes on this income he has had the money deposited by the publishers into a bank in Uruguay. His trip involves withdrawing the money, and smuggling it across the border into Argentina.
But already in the opening pages of his story of that day Lucas implies other, ulterior motives for his day trip to Montevideo, as, just before leaving the apartment, he describes giving “his kiss of Judas” (7) to his wife and young son. We soon learn that although his reasons for laundering the money through Uruguay are real, the process also serves him as the perfect cover for meeting up with the Uruguayan woman of the title, named Guerra, who has captured his heart though he’s only met her twice.His day in Montevideo begins smoothly and according to plan with a successful visit to the bank to obtain his money, which he then carefully secures in a money belt he’s brought along. Once Lucas turns his attention to his rendezvous with Guerra however, rational thinking and behavior slip ever farther from his grasp, as he sinks into an intoxicating brew of hope and expectation for his afternoon with her. In Guerra, or more precisely --- given how little he knows about her --- in the carefully constructed Guerra of his imagination, Lucas finds not only a young woman who excites him, but also the perfect receptacle for his dreams of leaving behind an existence that he has come to perceive as a stifling burden.
At forty-four, Lucas has sunk into a mid-life crisis that has provoked a deepening melancholy. Having exhausted the money from his first published works, he bridles against the need to have his wife pay the bills and lend him money with the income from her job. And, as much he loves his son, he blames the quotidian responsibilities of childcare for his struggles to make progress in his writing. Desperate to escape these growing frustrations, he envelopes himself in fantasies about a potential carefree future with Guerra.
That he imagines leaving behind his wife and son for a woman he barely knows highlights the confusion and delusion that roils his mind. And in fact, as his day in Montevideo continues, he becomes ever more impulsive, aggressively sloughing off the occasional moments of clarity in which he questions the sanity of his actions. Even the complications that his evening deadline for returning home introduce into his impetuous attempts to woo Guerra only increase his distress, reinforcing his broader frustrations with the constraints of his present life.
With nothing solid to grab onto, each move he makes only leaves him more committed to his desperate path, but also more uncertain about it. Can he trust anything he thinks he knows? Can he distinguish whether he is passing through to a happier place, or a sliding into an abyss?
Mairal has structured the novel as a letter or confessional piece Lucas writes to his wife a year or so after the fateful day, in which he describes to her what occurred between his early morning departure to the moment of his return home to the apartment late that same evening. Through flashbacks, we --- and his wife --- learn how he first met Guerra, and get his understanding of the difficult times he and his wife had been experiencing. As he looks back on the day in Montevideo, Lucas can also not help but offer occasional foreboding hints at what the day holds for him, and its eventual ramifications on him, and his family.
By writing it using the first person voice, Mairal has given the story a powerful intimacy. And he does a wonderful job of portraying Lucas’ mental dissolution, first and foremost by making Lucas trustworthy as a narrator --- however confused and destructive Lucas’ thinking that day in Montevideo, it’s clear that by the time he writes about it, he has arrived on solid ground. His clear and pitiless evaluation of his behavior in hindsight, as he describes that fateful day, keeps him from coming across as a simple adulterer.
As readers we are torn between wanting to shake him out of the destructive behavior that threatens his family’s future, and sympathizing with him in his search for happiness with Guerra. La uruguaya provides a seductive and compelling, one-day exploration into the consequences of someone permitting the powerful emotions of existential confusion and hopelessness to hold sway over their decisions and actions.
Other reviews / information:
Read quotes from the book here.
The translation from the Spanish of those quotes, and the one used in the review, are mine.
Unfortunately, it does not appear that La uruguaya has been translated into English yet.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
