Who Among Us? by Mario Benedetti review – a slippery love triangle
Mario Benedetti was a hugely cherished writer in his native Uruguay, amassing a bibliography of some 80 books by the time of his death in 2009, but he was not translated into English until recently. Now Nick Caistor has translated two short, splendid novels, both built around love triangles in which a woman – regretfully, cautiously – leaves her husband for another man.
In Springtime in a Broken Mirror, published last year, that wrench is made more poignant by the fact that the abandoned man is imprisoned abroad, a political prisoner. In Who Among Us? the setup is more straightforward, but still the woman’s choice to leave is a fraught one. Alicia’s 11-year marriage to her childhood sweetheart Miguel has given them two children, but it has faded and they are tired of each other. The disruptive element is their old friend Lucas, who charms and provokes both parties. But he is only disruptive because he is allowed to be. Dull, placid Miguel never quite got over the fact that Alicia married boring old him. Alicia even tells her lover about the infatuation: for Miguel, she explains, Lucas is “a kind of picture above the bed. When he embraces me, when we make love, he knows you’re there like a guardian angel.”
Lucas takes pains to show where his narrative differs from what actually happened, and interrogates the very idea of fiction writing
The book opens at the moment of crisis. Miguel, in an act of flamboyant self-harm, has engineered a meeting between Alicia and Lucas, who fled abroad when Alicia chose Miguel over him. What follows is told through four documentary elements: first a self-pitying diary by Miguel, in which he claws over the wounds of his marriage; then a letter written to Miguel by Alicia, confirming his worst fears, that she is definitely leaving him for Lucas; and finally a short story written by Lucas that fictionalises Alicia’s arrival in Buenos Aires, and what happens between them there.
The fourth voice is a series of footnotes to that same story in which Lucas takes pains to show where his narrative differs from what actually happened, and interrogates the very idea of fiction writing: “I don’t know how to tell myself stories,” he writes. “I know how to recognise the story in what I see or experience. Then I distort it, I add or subtract.” This was written in 1953, but it suits our current literary climate to a tee.
Related: Obituary: Mario Benedetti, Uruguayan writer and poet
This ingenious play of differing perspectives makes a simple, familiar story of betrayal something far more slippery and enticing – notwithstanding the fact that it is primarily the two men’s stories we get. Alicia makes her decision, and has her letter, but mostly she is the object of the men’s attention. Springtime in a Broken Mirror, too, fractures its telling to give everybody’s side of the story, but these narrative devices are not deployed merely for the sake of it. Both books are utterly fresh, at once heartbreaking and charming. Here’s hoping we’ll soon have more of Benedetti’s back catalogue to read.
• Who Among Us, translated by Nick Caistor, is published by Penguin Modern Classics (£8.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
