Five years ago, Edmundo Paz Soldan harbored very little skepticism about globalization. Indeed, the collapsing of international markets, especially in the realm of intellectual capital, had worked out for him. Soldan came to America from Cochamamba, Bolivia, in 1988 on a scholarship, and within five years he had earned a master’s degree in Hispanic literature. Within 10 years, the stocky Bolivian was a professor at Cornell University, the same Ivy League institution where Vladimir Nabokov lived in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
But that’s where things began to slow down. Soldan soon found himself in a position similar to the Russian-born novelist. “People used to ask me,” recalls Soldan, sitting at a Vietnamese restaurant in Ithaca, “when will I get to read your novels? Are you really a novelist?” After almost two decades of publishing, none of his fiction had been translated into English. Privately, he made excuses for his life apart. After all, he was published in Spain by the prestigious Alfaguara house, and is in constant demand as a columnist and journalist in Bolivia and Chile. He was a global soul. All he needed was a modem.
Then he went home to Bolivia in May of 2000. “A transnational water company called Bechtel had bought up the water rights,” says Soldan. “There were these riots that left 10-12 people dead.” As a result of the chaos, Bechtel was forced from the country – a victory, some say the first, in the antiglobalization movement, but it was a mixed victory. “Now Cochamamba still struggles with the water,” Soldan says. “The poorest neighborhoods do not have good water.”
At the time, Soldan was working on a short, abstract novel about a battle between a code-maker and a code-breaker. It was Borgesian, Nabakovian even. “When I got home, though, it hit me that that’s what I needed,” he says, “that setting: globalization, this resistance to transnational companies.” The combo worked, and “Turing’s Delirium” won the Premio Nacional de Novela in Bolivia, and catapulted him, at last, into an English translation.
“Turing’s Delirium” is Soldan’s second novel – it is preceded by “The Matter of Desire” – but it has the surest shot of putting him on the radar of English-speaking readers. Set in Rio Fugitivo, the fictional Bolivian town at the heart of Soldan’s previous fictions, the novel imagines that a group of antiglobalization activists set upon the government and GlobalLux, a multinational that has taken over the town’s power grid. Their weapon: a computer virus.
The hero, of sorts, is Miguel Saenz, a cryptanalyst for a government spy agency called Black Chamber. In the past, Saenz’s code-breaking has led to the death of radicals and saved the country from coup d’etats, earning him the nickname Turing, after the famous code breaker Alan Turing. Saenz knows this new rash of cybercrimes presents an opportunity for him to reclaim his former glory, to prove that computers have not made him obsolete.
Technology has always played a large role in Soldan’s fiction. A decade ago, he became involved with the McOndo Literary Movement, named after the fictional town in which Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels were set.
Composed of writers from Chile, Argentina and Peru, the group rejected magical realism and rural essentialism in favor of a more contemporary approach to storytelling. “In the ’80s, Latin America became less rural and more urban,” Soldan told The Boston Globe. “Four of the largest cities in the world – Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires – are in Latin America.”
Initially, Soldan received heavy criticism for reflecting this shift in his short stories and novels. “As recent as 15 years ago there was very little urban fiction,” he says. “The majority of Bolivian novelists felt this obligation to show the state of Bolivia, rural Bolivia. When I started publishing in the early ’80s I can remember the critics saying, ‘These are stories but where is Bolivia? Where are the Mayans?”‘
Since he lived in the United States, Soldan’s critics could also claim he was out of touch. “I got this kind of guilt trip, like I am not a good Bolivian.” So he created his fictional town of Rio Fugitivo. “It was very liberating,” says Soldan. “But I remember a friend of mine telling me, it’s still very close to Cocha-
mamba. He said, ‘You need to have a square with a statue of Bob Dylan.’ So in ‘The Matter of Desire,’ there is a statue of Bob Dylan. Now nobody can say anything about accuracy.”
But the real world has not been left behind entirely, especially in “Turing’s Delirium.” GlobaLux bears obvious similarities to Bechtel, and the characters of the novel wiz about using their Motorola and Ericsson mobile phones. “All these brand names have lots of connotations in a country like Bolivia,” Soldan says. “It’s a very poor country, but you have these islands of modernity. My friends, they have satellites, they have iPods, they have Nokias. They are so afraid of being backwards that they overcompensate.”
From Ithaca, Soldan will continue to think about these issues – but will not put answers in his fiction. “This is a novel about politics but it’s not a political novel,” he says, “I think there is a difference.”
John Freeman is a writer in New York.
