We learn, slowly—that the “parent writer” (Villarán) is about to have a son. We learn that “in the andean cosmovision, the individual is sociocentric, it is never conceived outside of the ‘we’”; that Morococha is a mining town and has been one since the mid-1700s. We learn (from “capital,” of course) that “copper is the engine of the world.” Eventually, we’ll hear the voices of some of the town’s residents (presented in Spanish in the main text and translated by Villarán in a section called “Testimonios” at the back of the book).
This multivocal approach is key to one of this book’s intended effects: the head-spinning confusion of modernity. Everything is slurred together. There is no place to stand, no real way to get your bearings.
Unless you write a book. Put some of that confusion between two covers, give it an organizing principle even as you try to represent your confusion on the page:
when one lives in a world that is collapsing,
constructing a book perhaps may be one of the few
survival tactics
These lines from Chilean writer Diamela Eltit are of a piece with the other fragments Villarán has gathered to keep himself going, to convince himself that what he’s doing is worth doing. The book opens with an epigraph from Eloy Neira:
what happens
if the way in which we study reality
is confusing, chaotic?
to inform about the encounter
to write
to show the inconsistency of reality.
Throughout, he’s writing this letter to his son, Miqel. Or it’s a series of letters in which he tries to explain to Miqel about reality’s “inconsistency.” Villarán is also concerned with complicity—his, yours, mine—un- der capitalism and our individual inability to avoid it.
for you, for us to have more things
places like this need to exist
i think that’s how it works.
The wholesale destruction of town, environment, the very systems that sustain life. Why would we be complicit in that? How is it that we don’t have the choice to opt out? Miqel’s implied presence puts the reader in the position of posing these childlike questions that shouldn’t be considered “childlike” at all but should instead be at the front of our minds and on the tips of our tongues.
Eventually, we learn that Villarán’s father hails from a respected and powerful Peruvian family. They know some of the people over on the capital side: “the two families [redacted] y villaran. now they run the largest gold mine in latin america. your grandaunt was the first elected woman mayor in the history of lima.”